Quotes About Goodness

Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy. Most of all it exhibits to us the connection, in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice.

Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.

I just want to serve and help people and be good to everybody, only it always goes wrong somehow—I think about suicide all the time, every bloody day I want to die and stop this torture, but I go crawling on . . . I'm so Christ-awful bloody lonely I could scream with it for hours on end.

Goodness appears to be both rare and hard to picture. It is perhaps most convincingly met with in simple people - inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families - but these cases are also the least illuminating.

Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?

To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.

There may be no God, but there's decency and - and there's truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.

Franca breathed the tranquility of the house, yet it was not tranquil, she breathed its goodness, but it was not good.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.

Kindness, I've discovered, is everything.

There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It's the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that's why they get noticed.

Mi Popo decía que el amor nos vuelve buenos. No importa a quién amemos, tampoco importa ser correspondidos o si la relación es duradera. Basta la experiencia de amar, eso nos transforma.

Memoria selectiva para recordar lo bueno, prudencia lógica para no arruinar el presente, y optimismo desafiante para encarar el futuro.

Hay mucha gente buena, Irina, pero es discreta. Los malos, en cambio, hacen mucho ruido, por eso se notan más.

Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.

La bondad desgasta mucho, te lo he advertido. Los malos se divierten más y llegan a viejos en mejores condiciones que los santos como tú.

there was only one aristocracy, that of decency, and that this was not inherited or bought with money or titles, but was only gained through good deeds.

C'è molta gente buona, Irina, ma è discreta. I cattivi, invece, fanno molto rumore, per questo si notano di più.

Parece que todos los hombres de su familia han sido de buen corazón, Alma. Hay poca gente así en este mundo. - Hay mucha gente buena, Irina, pero es discreta. Los malos, en cambio, hacen mucho ruido, por eso se notan más.

There are a lot of good people in the world but they keep quiet about it, it's bad ones that make noise a lot if noise and they get noticed.

Do well and right, and let the world sink.

Go, and do thou likewise.