Famous Quotes & Sayings

Epictetus

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to.

Epicurus

Necessity is an evil; but there is no necessity for continuing to live subject to necessity.

Epicurus

There is nothing to fear from gods, There is nothing to feel in death, Good can be attained, Evil can be endured.

Epicurus

Injustice is not evil in itself, but only in the fear and apprehension that one will not escape those who have been set up to punish the offense.

Epicurus

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can and does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If, as they say, God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?

Epictetus

Fortune is an evil chain to the body, and vice to the soul.

Epictetus

The cause of all human evils is the not being able to apply general principles to special cases.

Epictetus

Whenever you are angry, be assured that it is not only a present evil, but that you have increased a habit.

Emanuel Swedenborg

So far any one shuns evils, so far as he does good.

Even evil and evil-doing can be overcome by suggestion.

Ellis Peters

All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.

Tom Petty

You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down.

Simone Weil

Evil is license, and that is why it is monotonous: everything has to be drawn from ourselves. One is condemned to false infinity. That is hell itself.

Simone Weil

A society like the Church, which claims to be Divine is perhaps more dangerous on account of the ersatz good which it contains then on account of the evil which sullies it. Something of the social labelled divine: an intoxicating mixture which carries with it every sort of license. Devil disguised.

Simone Weil

There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.

Simone Weil

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Simone Weil

The human soul has need of security and also of risk. The fear of violence or of hunger or of any other extreme evil is a sickness of the soul. The boredom produced by a complete absence of risk is also a sickness of the soul.

Simone Weil

When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claim to excellence.

Simone Weil

Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it.

Simone Weil

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Rick Riordan

What was I up to, you may ask? I certainly didn't want to meet Monsieur Evil again or creepy old Lord Salamander.

Rem Koolhaas

Nigeria [in 1990] was all rumour, an unbelievable amount of rumour - largely about crime and almost mythical manifestations of evil.

Swami Vivekananda

The progress of the world through all its evils making it fit for the ideals, slowly but surely.

Swami Vivekananda

It is clear to us that, for good or for evil, our vitality is concentrated in our religion. You cannot change it. You cannot destroy it and put in its place another.

Swami Vivekananda

Change is always subjective. To talk of evil and misery is nonsense, because they do not exist outside. If I am immune from all anger, I never feel angry. If am immune from all hatred, I never feel hatred.

Ringo Starr

You're like the devil with horns in your head, the only way I'll get you is to get you in bed.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is handsomer to remain in the establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best manner, than to make asally against evil by some single improvement, without supporting it by a total regeneration.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of beat.

Laura Bush

We can overcome evil with greater good.

Thomas Aquinas

Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace: take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.

Thomas Aquinas

One cannot use an evil action with reference to a good intention.

Thomas Aquinas

We ought to cherish the body. Our body's substance is not from an evil principle, as the Manicheans imagine, but from God. And therefore, we ought to cherish the body by the friendship of love, by which we love God.

Thomas Aquinas

In the realm of evil thoughts none induces to sin as much as do thoughts that concern the pleasure of the flesh.