Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. – C.S. Lewis
There’s nothing wrong with loving your family or your nation, and this happens with everyone. But it’s only harmless as long as you do no evil to others because of your love for your family or nation.
—Leo Tolstoy
Neither man nor angel can discern hypocrisy, the only evil that walks invisible except to God alone.
—John Milton
A cardinal doctrine of modern liberalism is that the world’s evil may be overcome by the world’s good; no help is thought to be needed from outside the world.
—J. Gresham Machen
Boredom is the root of all evil – the despairing refusal to be oneself.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
—Søren Kierkegaard
Be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth, that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
—Socrates
When speaking of divine perfection, we signify that God is just and true and loving, the author of order, not disorder, of good, not evil.
We signify that he is justice, that he is truth, that he is love, that he is order, that he is the very progress of.
—Plato
The Tao doesn’t take sides; it gives birth to both good and evil.
—Laozi
To recognize untruth as a condition of life–that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
To recognize untruth as a condition of life–that certainly means resisting accustomed value feelings in a dangerous way; and a philosophy that risks this would by that token alone place itself beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
We have not a deliverance from trouble, a recovering of health, ease of pain, freedom from any evil that ever laid hold upon us, but it is given us on the intercession of Jesus Christ.
—John Owen
It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.
—Charles Darwin
By the grace of God, know thyself. Know and feel that thou wast shapen in wickedness, and in sin did thy mother conceive thee; and that thou thyself hast been heaping sin upon sin, ever since thou couldst discern good from evil.
—John Wesley
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
—Plato
No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.
—Plato
Ignorance of all things is an evil neither terrible nor excessive, nor yet the greatest of all; but great cleverness and much learning, if they be accompanied by a bad training, are a much greater misfortune.
—Plato
Be of good hope in the face of death. Believe in this one truth for certain, that no evil can befall a good man either in life or death, and that his fate is not a matter of indifference to the gods.
—Socrates
Even philosophers will praise war as ennobling mankind, forgetting the Greek who said: ’War is bad in that it begets more evil than it kills.’
—Immanuel Kant
If in rage you wish to harm someone, whether you succeed or not, as a result of your rage you’re certainly committing evil against yourself.
—Leo Tolstoy
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
—Cicero
Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
—Blaise Pascal
For when the sense of religion diminishes, the notion of good and evil is erased, the sense of responsibility and guilt is suppressed, so that passion and lust have free rein and the wickedness of the heart breaks forth openly in the form of shameless evil acts.
—Herman Bavinck
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.
—Albert Einstein
O that the Lord would be my support and comforter in an evil world!
—David Brainerd
A sincere Christian falls into sin and commits evil, yet he proceeds not from evil to evil as the ungodly do but makes his fall into one sin a caution to prevent another sin…. It is not so with the servants of sin. One sin leaves them much more disposed to another sin.
—John Flavel
The intrinsic evil and filthiness that is in sin keeps back the gracious soul from it: Abhor that which is evil; hate it as hell itself (Rom 12:9).
—John Flavel
Everything that is evil is under the judgment of God.
—Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
The upright soul hates sin in himself more than he hates it in any other, as a man hates a serpent in the hedge, but much more in his own bosom: But I see another law in my members…I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me (Rom. 7:23, 21).
—John Flavel