Quotes About Goodness

Naive, harmless people usually guide their perceptions and actions with a few simple axioms: people are basically good; no one really wants to hurt anyone else; the threat (and, certainly, the use) of force, physical or otherwise, is wrong.

In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance.

Nicomachean Ethics.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life.

An idea begins to take shape: "I am going to live my life properly. I am going to aim at the good. I am going to aim at the highest good I can possible manage.

The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God's goodness—the goodness of reality—was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That's insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.

A villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

Um herói é algo positivo, não apenas a ausência do mal.

You decide that you will start treating Old Testament God, with all His terrible and oft-arbitrary-seeming power, as if He could also be New Testament God (even though you understand the many ways in which that is absurd). In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness—if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith, that allows you to overcome nihilism, and resentment, and arrogance.

Evil is a form of idiocy. Kindness is a form of intelligence.

You have believed that what crime and iniquity have defiled and deformed, another crime and another iniquity can purify and redeem. Wrong! Hate never produces anything but monsters and crime criminals! Love alone realizes wonderful works, virtue alone can save!

If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave.

The "supreme good" and its attainment -- that is happiness. And joy is: response to happiness.

Sweet are the slumbers of the virtuous man.

Unbounded courage and compassion join'd / Tempering each other in the victor's mind / Alternately proclaim him good and great / And make the hero and the man complete.

It is an unspeakable advantage to possess our minds with an habitual good intention, and to aim all our thoughts, words, and actions, at some laudable end.

If there's a power above us, (And that there is all nature cries aloud through all her works) he must delight in virtue.

Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, the post of honor is a private station.

You have both declared your consent. May the Lord in his goodness strengthen your consent and fill you both with His blessings.

In the novel A Ghost, A Witch, and a Goblin by Scholastic Book Services, from Baba Yaga, a Russian witch story, the Good Aunt says to her niece, "Because you are so brave and so good, you will be stronger than all the wicked creatures you may meet.

IV-40. Pride and ambition caused me to go against God. But why? He's the one who gave me my glory. He was kind to me. And he didn't ask much in return. IV-46. What was so hard about giving him the praise and thanks that he deserved? IV-48. But all his goodness only made me bad. IV-49. I was in a high position, but it just made me want to be higher. IV-52. I got sick of always saying thank you.

when God made time He made a ruddy great lot of it, and, when He made people, His artistry was not limited to This Sort and None Other, that Love is not a matter of who puts what where but of wanting only goodness and respectful kindliness for the loved one. There is no sort of love that can never find its home. Life has its cruelties but it is not as cruel as that. [Bram Stoker]

In the absence of virtue and wisdom, intelligence becomes a servant of evil.