Quotes About Good

Stoicism is about developing the tools to deal as effectively as humanly possible with the ensuing conflicts, does not demand perfection, and does not provide specific answers: those are for fools (Epictetus's word) who think the world is black and white, good versus evil, where it is always possible to clearly tell the good guys from the bad guys. That is not the world we live in, and to pretend otherwise is more than a bit dangerous and not at all wise.

I came to understand later that the requirement to extirpate anger in the Buddhist and Stoic cases has to do with the primacy of ethics in both philosophies. The aim of ethics is to do good, to reduce pain and suffering (dukkha), and, if possible, to bring happiness in its stead. Anger, at least in one standard mode, aims to hurt, to do harm, to inflict suffering. And one should never aim to do that.

An angel's weaknesses are better than a devil's strengths.

The haiku that reveals seventy to eighty percent of its subject is good. Those that reveal fifty to sixty percent, we never tire of.

Is happiness the aim?" "I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good

Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

But while choice is infinite, our lives have time spans. We can't live every life. We can't watch every film or read every book or visit every single place on this sweet earth. Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don't need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything.

Who knows? Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

So heaven is life with the good bits taken out, and with an all-white backdrop.

Is happiness the aim?' 'I don't know. I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good.

I suppose I want my life to mean something. I want to do something good.

Every second of every day we are entering into a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. (...) the good stuff makes it worthwhile.

Yet just as a classic heroic tale needs a Saint, an unabashedly White-Hatted and periodically naive champion of romantic love, so too it isn't quite complete without that other, more dubious, good guy: The Black Knight.

The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?).

To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose , you elected , is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

It was a common saying among the Puritans, "Brown bread and the Gospel is good fare."

such is the corruption of nature that the bad are much more likely to debauch the good than the good to reform the bad.

Outward losses drive good people to their prayers, but bad people to their curses.

It is very fit, and of good use, that ministers should be ordained publicly, plebe praesente – in the presence of the common people, according to the usage of the primitive church.

is a great vexation to the spirits of good ministers to see people deaf to all the fair warnings given them, and running headlong upon ruin, notwithstanding all the kind methods taken to prevent it.

The restraints and warnings of the divine law are all intended for our good, and to keep us out of that danger into which we should otherwise, by our own folly, run ourselves.

The power of men's laws may bind a man to good behavior, but it is only the power of God's grace that will renew a right spirit within him (Ps. 51:10). It is this that