Quotes About Evil

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

And thus the law is indeed good, because it is prohibition of sin, and death is evil because it is the wages of sin; but as wicked men make an evil use not only of evil, but also of good things, so the righteous make a good use not only of good, but also of evil things. Whence it comes to pass that the wicked make an ill use of the law, though the law is good; and that the good die well, though death is an evil.

That death is not to be judged an evil which is the end of a good life; for death becomes evil only by the retribution which follows it.

For hence I believed Evil also to be some such kind of substance, and to have its own foul and hideous bulk; whether gross, which they called earth, or thin and subtile (like the body of the air), which they imagine to be some malignant mind, creeping through that earth. And because a piety, such as it was, constrained me to believe that the good God never created any evil nature, I conceived two masses, contrary to one another, both unbounded, but the evil narrower, the good more expansive.

My good deeds are Thine appointments, and Thy gifts; my evil ones are my offences, and Thy judgments.

For evil men account those things alone evil which do not make men evil; neither do they blush to praise good things, and yet to remain evil among the good things they praise. It grieves them more to own a bad house than a bad life, as if it were man's greatest good to have everything good but himself.

Lord, have pity on me. My evil sorrows strive with my good joys; and on which side is the victory, I know not.

For God is unchangeable, and wholly proof against injury. Therefore the vice which makes those who are called His enemies resist Him, is an evil not to God, but to themselves. And to them it is an evil, solely because it corrupts the good of their nature.

Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart, which Thou hadst pity upon in the bottom of the bottomless pit. Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!

For evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name "evil."

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

In an effort to find an explanation, he or she might attribute the ominous feelings to poisons, electromagnetic radiation, evil forces, secret organizations, or even extraterrestrial influences. The spontaneous emergence of memories involving intrauterine disturbances or of the onset of the delivery from the womb, seems to be among important causes of paranoid states.

The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist.

What we call evil is the instability inherent in all mankind which drives man outside and beyond himself toward an unfathomable something, exactly as though Nature had bequeathed to our souls an ineradicable portion of instability from her store of ancient chaos.

I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

For the first time in my life I began to realize that it is not evil and brutality, but nearly always weakness, that is to blame for the worst things that happen in this world.

The created world, including a major portion of the human mind, is seen as evil by the Gnostic primarily because it distracts consciousness away from knowledge of the Divine.

Gnostic teachings speak of the reality and power of evil and its fundamental presence throughout manifest existence. They declare that while we may not be able to rid the world or ourselves of evil, we may, and indeed will, rise above it through gnosis.

Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility-lest we prefer instead to wallow in a perennial state of powerless, frustrated, furious, victimhood. For what one possesses the power to bring about, one has also the power to limit, mitigate, counteract, or transmute.

We have to bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.

Overcome evil with good, falsehood with truth, and hatred with love. The message isn't new, but we haven't learned to live it yet.

In battling evil, excess is good; for he who is moderate in announcing the truth is presenting half-truth. He conceals the other half out of fear of people's wrath.

It seems to me that any ideology is bad because it is inevitably reductive and identifies other ideologies as evil, and itself with truth, whereas both truth and goodness are always transcendent.