quotations about evil
Like the emery and sand with which we scour off rude surfaces, evil and trouble in this world are but instruments. And they are in the hands of God.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
A Vindication of the Rights of Men
It is some compensation for great evils that they enforce great lessons.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.
ST. AUGUSTINE
Enchridion
What we are accustomed to decry as great social evils, will, for the most part, be found to be only the out-growth of our own perverted life; and though we may endeavor to cut them down and extirpate them by means of law, they will only spring up again with fresh luxuriance in some other form, unless the conditions of human life and character are radically improved.
SAMUEL SMILES
Self-Help
Evil is a point of view.
ANNE RICE
Interview with the Vampire
To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Dhammapada
The term "evil powers" is one you hear only in the church, or in Marvel comic books, or Republican speeches.
GARRISON KEILLOR
"Social Separation Breeds Contempt", Salon, Jan. 12, 2010
There are no self-proclaimed villains, only regiments of self-proclaimed saints. Victorious historians rule where good or evil lies.
GLEN COOK
The Black Company
Evil, why have you taken over God's children's eyes
Evil, before they could really grow to see
That your way is not the way to make life what it should be
STEVIE WONDER
"Evil", Music of My Mind
I do not believe in evil--I believe that we are human and fallible, that we make things and spoil them in an ordinary way.
ANNE ENRIGHT
The Gathering
All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disc of infinite light.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Evil is the plague of the soul.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
The more you are offended at your evil thoughts, the less they are yours.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
All men are more wicked in thought than action.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
Good and Evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different: And diverse men differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight, but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of the common life. Nay, the same man, in diverse times, differs from himself, and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.
THOMAS HOBBES
Leviathan
There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone: you can't isolate yourself, and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
GEORGE ELIOT
Adam Bede
Most of us have learned to be dispassionate about evil, to look it in the face and find, as often as not, our own grinning reflections with which we do not argue, but good is another matter. Few have stared at that long enough to accept that its face too is grotesque, that in us the good is something under construction. The modes of evil usually receive worthy expression. The modes of good have to be satisfied with a cliche or a smoothing down that will soften their real look.
FLANNERY O'CONNOR
Mystery and Manners
There is this of good in real evils, they deliver us while they last from the petty despotism of all that were imaginary.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
But there shall be no reward to the evil man. No reward, did I say? Nay, if God be just, then he will render indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, to every soul of man that doth evil, without respect of persons. To him belongeth vengeance. Though patience may delay, though clemency may mitigate, though mercy, grace, and wisdom, may transfer the punishment to the person of a surety; yet still his wrath must be revealed against all unrighteousness and ungodliness of men.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On the Inevitable Misery of the Wicked", Select Essays, Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity