Beyond Good Evil Quotes

As long as you still experience the stars as something "above you", you lack the eye of knowledge. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Power is power as the sun is the sun, the wind is the wind. The villager blesses the rain as it falls on his crops; the pillager uses it to cover his approach. It is the wielder who determines the good or evil. ~ Sheri S. Tepper

Clearly, one primary purpose of our existence upon the earth is to obtain a body of flesh and bones. We have also been given the gift of agency. In a thousand ways we are privileged to choose for ourselves. Here we learn from the hard taskmaster of experience. We discern between good and evil. We differentiate as to the bitter and the sweet. We discover that there are consequences attached to our actions. ~ Thomas S. Monson

How shall a man judge what to do in such times?'
'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear ... It is a man's part to discern them, as much in th Golden Wood as in his own house. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

When some one sorrow, that is yet reparable, gets hold of your mind like a monomania,
when you think, because Heaven has denied you this or that, on which you had set your heart, that all your life must be a blank,
oh, then diet yourself well on biography,
the biography of good and great men. See how little a space one sorrow really makes in life. See scarce a page, perhaps, given to some grief similar to your own, and how triumphantly the life sails on beyond it. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

You are good when you walk to your goal firmly and with bold steps.
Yet you are not evil when you go thither limping.
For those who limp go not backwards.
But you who are strong and swift, see that you do not limp before the lame, deeming it kindness. ~ Kahlil Gibran

Once you can express yourself, you can tell the world what you want from it ... All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words. ~ Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy. ~ George R R Martin

You have the skill. What is more, you were born a woman, And women, though most helpless in doing good deeds, Are of every evil the cleverest of contrivers. ~ Euripides

The statesman must think in terms of the national interest, conceived as power among other powers. The popular mind, unaware of the fine distinctions of the statesman's thinking, reasons more often than not in the simple moralistic and legalistic terms of absolute good and absolute evil. ~ Hans Morgenthau

Discernment and detachment (Jurists and apatheia) are two characters of the mature Christian soul. They are not yet the mark of a mystic, but they bear witness that one is traveling the right way to mystical contemplation, and that the stage of beginners is passed. The presence of discernment and detachment is manifested by a spontaneous thirst for what is good - charity, union with the will of God - and an equally spontaneous repugnance for what is evil. The man who has this virtue no longer needs to be exhorted by promises to do what is right, or deterred from evil by threat of punishment. ~ Thomas Merton

Everybody has an instinctive desire to do good things and avoid evil. But that desire is sterile as long as we have no experience of what it means to be good ... ~ Thomas Merton

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will. ~ Epictetus

Three quarters of these people know
Instinctively what ought to be
The nature of society
And how they'd live there if they could.
If it were easy to be good,
And cheap, and plain as evil, how,
We all would be its members now... ~ W. H. Auden

Such beliefs were born in man's willful refusal to use his mind, in his lust for the unearned, his wish for success without effort. Such beliefs were the embodiment of hatred for all that was good, hatred for virtue, hatred for value. It was ultimately a hatred of themselves, of life, of existence. It was that hate, that dedication to death, that was the true manifestation of evil. ~ Terry Goodkind

XIV. Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for philosophy, they alone really live; for they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex ever age to their own; all the years that have gone ore them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labours we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt32 with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since Nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters? ~ Giordano Bruno

True and baseless evil is as rare as the purest good
and we all know how rare that is ... ~ Jasper Fforde

It's the fools that make all the trouble in the world, not the wicked. ~ L.M. Montgomery

You cannot contain evil by shaming it, or making people feel guilty, but only by revealing it toward it is, and then seeing the good as better. ~ Richard Rohr

I reckon the gods laugh many a time to hear us, but what matters so long as we remember that we're only men and don't take to fancying that we're gods ourselves, really, knowing good and evil. ~ L.M. Montgomery

What inspires me is what I see people wearing on the streets of the world from New York to London and beyond. I get my ideas and inspiration from pounding the pavement all over the world. Today, fashion is dictated by individual style. To me, the fashion of the future is anything that a young guy or girl feels good wearing as long as it's put together in the right way. ~ Steve Madden

This is the first lesson ye should learn: There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, it doesn't behoove any of us to speak evil of the rest of us. This is a universal law, and until one begins to make application of same, one may not go very far in spiritual or soul development. ~ Edgar Cayce

You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. ~ Richard Bach

The idea of the past is as useless as the idea of the future. Both could be invoked by anybody about anything. There is never any more beauty than there is now. There is no more joy or wonder or sorrow than there is now, nor perfection, nor any more evil nor any more good than there is now. ~ Richard Flanagan

Thus he shut himself up, he lived there, he was absolutely satisfied with it, leaving on one side the prodigious questions which attract and terrify, the fathomless perspectives of abstraction, the precipices of metaphysics - all those profundities which converge, for the apostle in God, for the atheist in nothingness; destiny, good and evil, the way of being against being, the conscience of man, the thoughtful somnambulism of the animal, the transformation in death, the recapitulation of existences which the tomb contains, the incomprehensible grafting of successive loves on the persistent I, the essence, the substance, the Nile, and the Ens, the soul, nature, liberty, necessity; perpendicular problems, sinister obscurities, where lean the gigantic archangels of the human mind; formidable ~ Victor Hugo

Before we set out to do good, it is necessary to consider if it will result in evil. It is equally necessary to know that a bad action may ultimately result in good. ~ Osho

That is what a shadow is, an empty space, a hole in the light. Evil is that - a hole in the goodness of God. Evil is all that lacks the goodness of God, a willful choice to turn away from the full goodness of God to that empty of His goodness.
All God makes is good. Can it be that, that which seems to oppose the will of God actually is used of Him to accomplish the will of God. That which seems evil only seems so because of perspective, the way the eyes see the shadows. Above the clouds, light never stops shining. ~ Ann Voskamp

Christians must go beyond criticizing the degradation of American culture, roll up their sleeves, and get to work on positive solutions. The only way to drive out bad culture is with good culture. ~ Nancy Pearcey

Guide to the world of the dead. When you are certain that the body has left you, feel sad for the good you didn't get to do; then stop feeling sad and begin your journey to the past. Feel happy for the evil you didn't get to do, then stop feeling happy and realize that what propels you is chance, which when you were going in the opposite direction seemed to you like order, or necessity. ~ Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Our minds should not be empty because if they are not preoccupied by good, evil will break in upon them. ~ Samuel Johnson

To Harry James Potter,'" he read, and Harry's insides contracted with a sudden excitement, "'I leave the Snitch he caught in his first Quidditch match at Hogwarts, as a reminder of the rewards of perseverance and skill.'"
As Scrimgeour pulled out the tiny, walnut-sized golden ball, its silver wings fluttered rather feebly, and Harry could not help feeling a definite sense of anticlimax.
"Why did Dumbledore leave you this Snitch?" asked Scrimgeour.
"No idea," said Harry. "For the reasons you just read out, I supposed . . . to remind me what you can get if you . . . persevere and whatever it was."
"You think this a mere symbolic keepsake, then?"
"I suppose so," said Harry. "What else could it be?"
"I'm asking the questions," said Scrimgeour, shifting his chair a little closer to the sofa. Dusk was really falling outside now; the marquee beyond the windows towered ghostly white over the hedge.
"I notice that your birthday cake is in the shape of a Snitch," Scrimgeour said to Harry. "Why is that?"
Hermione laughed derisively.
"Oh, it can't be a reference to the fact Harry's a great Seeker, that's way too obvious," she said. "There must be a secret message from Dumbledore hidden in the icing!"
"I don't think there's anything hidden in the icing," said Scrimgeour, "but a Snitch would be a very good hiding place for a small object. You know why, I'm sure?"
Harry shrugged. Hermione, however, answered: Harry thought that answering ~ J.K. Rowling

Moral authority has been laid to rest, world opinion is no more than a game show and the difference between good and evil is about as relevant as changing channels. ~ Ralph Steadman

I hope you haven't given up on the S.Q.'s of the world, Reynie. As you see, there are a great many sheep in wolves' clothing. If not for S.Q.'s good nature, we'd never have escaped. ~ Trenton Lee Stewart

You and many outstanding inventors and writers have striven for the ideal and have thereby helped yourself do remarkably well. REBT, therefore, does not oppose competition or striving for outstanding achievement. It advocates task-perfection, not self-perfection." "What does that mean?" "It means that you can try to be as good, or even as perfect, as you can - at any project or task. You can try to make it ideal. But you are not a good person if it is perfect. You are still a person who completed a perfect project, but never a good person for doing so." "How, then, do I become an incompetent or bad person?" "You don't! When you do incompetent or evil acts, you become a person who acted badly - never a bad person. ~ Albert Ellis

perhaps the problem of evil is a human problem, one of an egotistical mind-set, an anthropocentric bent in our thinking and perspective. ~ Jacob M. Held