76 Quotes On Good And Evil

In the eternal struggle between good and evil, philosophers, authors, and thinkers have long sought to define these dual forces that shape human experience. Their words have offered wisdom, provoked introspection, and inspired action in countless hearts and minds. In our curated collection of 76 quotes, we delve into this profound dichotomy, exploring perspectives from various cultures and epochs. Whether you're seeking insight into human nature, morality, or the choices that define us, these quotes promise to stir your imagination and challenge your understanding of the world around us. Join us as we journey through the timeless dialogue of what it means to be good or evil.

1. “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

2. “I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.” - Charles Dickens

3. “No one is moral among the god-controlled puppets of the Iliad. Good and evil do not exist.” - Julian Jaynes

4. “There is no good and evil, there is only power and those too weak to seek it.” - J.K. Rowling

5. “You know how confusing the whole good-evil concept is for me.” - Jim Butcher

6. “What if evil doesn't really exist? What if evil is something dreamed up by man, and there is nothing to struggle against except out own limitations? The constant battle between our will, our desires, and our choices?” - Libba Bray

7. “A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.” - George Bernard Shaw

8. “Within the infant rind of this small flowerPoison hath residence and medicine power.For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;Being tasted, stays all senses with the heart.Two such opposèd kings encamp them still,In man as well as herbs—grace and rude will. And where the worser is predominant,Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.(Inside the little rind of this weak flower, there is both poison and powerful medicine. If you smell it, you feel good all over your body. But if you taste it, you die. There are two opposite elements in everything, in men as well as in herbs—good and evil. When evil is dominant, death soon kills the body like cancer.) ” - William Shakespeare

9. “Now is the dramatic moment of fate, Watson, when you hear a step upon the stair which is walking into your life, and you know not whether for good or ill.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

10. “Faustus, who embraced evil and shunned righteousness, became the foremost symbol of the misuse of free will, that sublime gift from God with its inherent opportunity to choose virtue and reject iniquity. “What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) - but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life of fleeting pleasure with no true peace? This was the blackest and most captivating tragedy of all, few could have remained indifferent to the growing intrigue of this individual who apparently shook hands with the devil and freely chose to descend to the molten, sulphuric chasm of Hell for all eternity for so little in exchange. It is a drama that continues to fascinate today as powerfully as when Faustus first disseminated his infamous card in the Heidelberg locale to the scandal of his generation. In fine, a life of good or evil, the hope of Heaven or the despair of Hell, Faustus stands as a reminder that the choice between these two absolutes also falls to us.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

11. “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

12. “The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.” - Jeff Cooper

13. “I make mistakes, but I am on the side of Good," the Golux said, "by accident and happenchance. I had high hopes of being Evil when I was two, but in my youth I came upon a firefly burning in a spider's web. I saved the victim's life.""The firefly's ?" said the minstrel."The spider's. The blinking arsonist had set the web on fire.” - James Thurber

14. “People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.” - Terry Pratchett

15. “To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.” - Stephen R. Lawhead

16. “Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.” - Anthony Burgess

17. “And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.” - Joyce Carol Oates

18. “Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

19. “One thing yo learn when you've lived as long as I have-people aren't all good, and people aren't all bad. We move in and out of darkness and light all of our lives. Right now, I'm pleased to be in the light.” - Neal Shusterman

20. “People may be persuaded that the machine is doing good. In fact, good is only capable of being done on a small scale. Evil is more versatile. You can hate those you have never seen, all the vast multitudes of them, but you can only love those you know — and that with difficulty.” - John Christopher

21. “The best men are not consistent in good—why should the worst men be consistent in evil?” - Wilkie Collins

22. “I'm half good and I'm half bad. My mama is a very good girl and my daddy is a very bad boy. And I guess that leaves me somewhere sort of...here.” - C. JoyBell C.

23. “I thought, gazing at the beauty of the landscape again, it is as though the fiend has prevailed against the angels, and fixed his throne in a heaven, to rule it as though it were Hell.” - Tom Holland

24. “There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist. A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in the face of death. Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein

25. “Sully disapproved of destruction for destruction's sake, which seemed ever more popular in the modern world, but he always took delight in burning out or otherwise eliminating Evil when Evil just couldn't keep its ugly head down and stay in the shadows, when it came right at you with all teeth bared. The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.” - Dean Koontz

26. “The fact that you are possessed by a demon does not mean you must become evil. Being evil is a choice, just as being good is a choice. If you let the demon take over, it's because you choose to.” - James Swain

27. “All my life, I've understood the nature of where I come from, but I never thought it might be wicked until now.” - Brenna Yovanoff

28. “Cruelty and wrong are not the greatest forces in the world. There is nothing eternal in them. Only love is eternal.” - Elisabeth Elliot

29. “The fact is that we have no way of knowing if the person who we think we are is at the core of our being. Are you a decent girl with the potential to someday become an evil monster, or are you an evil monster that thinks it's a decent girl?""Wouldn't I know which one I was?""Good God, no. The lies we tell other people are nothing to the lies we tell ourselves.” - Derek Landy

30. “Are the great spiritual teachings really advocating that we fight evil because we are on the side of light, the side of peace? Are they telling us to fight against that other 'undesirable' side, the bad and the black. That is a big question. If there is wisdom in the sacred teachings, there should not be any war. As long as a person is involved with warfare, trying to defend or attack, then his action is not sacred; it is mundane, dualistic, a battlefield situation.” - CHOGYAM TRUNGPA

31. “We run to place and power over the dead bodies of those who fail and fall; ay, we win the food we eat from out the mouths of starving babes.” - H. Rider Haggard

32. “You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.” - Leo Tolstoy

33. “All right I think we've been down here in the dark long enough. There's a whole other world upstairs. Take my hand, Constant Reader, and I'll be happy to lead you back into the sunshine. I'm happy to go there because I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of.” - Stephen King

34. “Evil forges a tornado.But goodness battles in a straight line.” - Caris Roane

35. “[I]t was with a good end in mind – that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil – that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good.” - Moderata Fonte

36. “Maybe it’s not as clear-cut as that. Maybe it’s the very presence of one thing – light or darkness – that necessitates the existence of the other.Think about it, people couldn’t become legendary heroes if they hadn’t first done something to combat darkness. Doctors could do no good if thereweren’t diseases for them to treat.” - Jessica Shirvington

37. “Good and Evil are very hard to explain or understand. I'm sure that evil exists, but it is hard to isolate. Good and evil are intertwined and impossible to separate. They are not completely opposites and in fact are often one and the same.” - Keith Haring

38. “In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

39. “Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we've faced them.” - Sarah J. Maas

40. “... true evil needs no reason to exist, it simply is and feeds upon itself.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

41. “It is well, I think, for us to learn to tell evil from good; but it has its price, as everything does. We leave our evil friend behind.” - Gene Wolfe

42. “Vicious actions are not hurtful because they are forbidden, but forbidden because they are hurtful.” - Benjamin Franklin

43. “Good and Evil are opposite points on a circle, Dr. Chiver. Greater good is just halfway back to Bad.” - Sheri Holman

44. “Who knew what evil lurked in the hearts of men? A copper, that's who. (...)You saw how close men lived to the beast. You realized that people like Carcer were not mad. They were incredibily sane. They were simply men without a shield. They'd looked at the world and realized that all the rules didn't have to apply to them, not if they didn't want them to. They weren't fooled by all the little stories. They shook hands with the beast.” - Terry Pratchett

45. “People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain't so.” - Jim Butcher

46. “And I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference...” - Marion Zimmer Bradley

47. “I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.” - Terry Pratchett

48. “Das Negative zu tun, ist uns noch auferlegt, das Positive ist uns schon gegeben.” - Franz Kafka

49. “Wenn man einmal das Böse bei sich aufgenommen hat, verlangt es nicht mehr, daß man ihm glaube.” - Franz Kafka

50. “With Stefan, the line between good and evil, right and wrong, becomes increasingly blurred.” - Melika Dannese Lux

51. “War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

52. “You see we do, yet see you but our handsAnd this the bleeding business they have done:Our hearts you see not; they are pitiful” - William Shakespeare

53. “Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.” - Ernest Hemingway

54. “Some people misunderstand evil and believe it will relent, and because their misplaced hope inspires dark hearts to dream darker dreams, they are the fathers and mothers of all wars. Evil does not relent; it must be defeated. And even when defeated, uprooted, and purified by fire, evil leaves behind a seed that will one day germinate and, in blooming, again be misunderstood.” - Dean Koontz

55. “Many have stood their ground and faced the darkness when it comes for them. Fewer come for the darkness and force it to face them.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky

56. “I was modest--they accused me of being crafty: I became secretive. I felt deeply good and evil--nobody caressed me, everybody offended me: I became rancorous. I was gloomy--other children were merry and talkative. I felt myself superior to them--but was considered inferior: I became envious. I was ready to love the whole world--none understood me: and I learned to hate.” - Mikhail Lermontov

57. “Good to evil seems evil.” - Ray Bradbury

58. “Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.” - C. S. Lewis

59. “Life is not interested in good and evil. Don Quixote was constantly choosing between good and evil, but then he was choosing in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy trying to cope with people that he had no time to distinguish between good and evil. Since people exist only in life, they must devote their time simply to being alive. Life is motion, and motion is concerned with what makes man move—which is ambition, power, pleasure. What time a man can devote to morality, he must take by force from the motion of which he is a part. He is compelled to make choices between good and evil sooner or later, because moral conscience demands that from him in order that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse he had to accept from the gods in order to gain from them the right to dream.” - William Faulkner

60. “I want something good to die for. . . to make it beautiful to live.” - Stacey T. Hunt

61. “Perante o seu momentâneo desânimo, a mãe encheu uma panela com água e deu-lhe nove ocos. Disse: «Põe os ovos, um a um, dentro de água, com cuidado para não se partirem. Os que forem ao fundo, estão bons, os que vierem acima, estão estragados.Duarte perguntou se não deveria ser ao contrário: os maus irem ao fundo e os bons nadarem.A mãe riu-se: «Não, os bons vão ao fundo.»” - João Ricardo Pedro

62. “As for Doing-good...I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.” - Henry David Thoreau

63. “Since man always remains free and since his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be definitively established in this world. Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last forever is making a false promise; he is overlooking human freedom. Freedom must be constantly won over for the cause of good. Free assent to the good never exists simply by itself. If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined and good state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all.” - Pope Benedict-XVI

64. “This is not going to be easy. I'm good at being bad, but I'm bad at being good. I don't know the first thing about good deeds.” - Neal Shusterman

65. “Good' did not triumph. 'Evil' did not triumph. The two resolved, destroyed each other and created new 'evils', new 'goods' which slew each other in their turn.” - Eric Ambler

66. “Good and bad exist always, everywhere” - R. Alan Woods

67. “Evil might not prevail in the end, but it certainly doesn't fail to devastate in its time.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

68. “The greatest power of bureaucracies is to make the smart act stupid and the good to act evil.” - Raul Ramos y Sanchez

69. “It's going to be like an...aura, I guess."He looked down at me and raised an eyebrow. "Explain?""Like even though there are outside forces pushing through the walls, in here it's like a bubble of goodness. Like coming home."I could feel him smiling and it encouraged me to elaborate. "When I think of how others would see it, I imagine them seeing a force of goodness overshadowing a force of evil, protecting it.” - Jessica Shirvington

70. “So maybe the difference isn't language. Maybe it's this: animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do. We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. The dragons are dangerous, yes. They can do harm, yes. But they're not evil. They're beneath our morality, if you will, like any animal. Or beyond it. They have nothing to do with it. We must choose and choose again. The animals need only be and do. We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom...” - Ursula K. Le Guin

71. “Beware when wrong-doing is called good and right-doing is called evil.” - R. Alan Woods

72. “Deep down, she's a good person, Diana is," Caine said, and sighed. "Deep down, I'm not. But she is.” - Michael Grant

73. “There is more goodness than evil in the world, but you know, you still got to work at it.” - Lasky Kathryn

74. “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange...How shall a man judge what to do in such times?' 'As he ever has judged,' said Aragorn. 'Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man's part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

75. “The image that comes to mind is a boxing ring. There are times when...you just want that bell to ring, but you're the one who's losing. The one who's winning doesn't have that feeling. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you are willing to give. And then you say, 'Life is not something that should have been. I'm not going to play the game. I'm going to meditate. I'm going to call "out".'There are three positions possible. One is the up-to-it, and facing the game and playing through. The second is saying, Absolutely not. I don't want to stay in this dogfight. That's the absolute out. The third position is the one that says, This is mixed of good and evil. I'm on the side of the good. I accept the world with corrections. And may [the world] be the way I like it. And it's good for me and my friends. There are only the three positions.” - Joseph Campbell

76. “পাচটি জিনিস খুব খারাপ১) আলেমের খারাপ কাজ২) শাসকের লালসাবৃত্তি৩) বৃদ্ধের জেনাকারিতা৪) ধনীর কৃপণতা৫) নারীর নির্লজ্জতা” - হযরত আলী রাঃ