Nature has no principles. She makes no distinction between good and evil.
It has been rightly said that nothing is unimportant, nothing powerless in the universe; a single atom can dissolve everything, and save everything! What terror! There lies the eternal distinction between good and evil.
When I sit down to write a novel, I am exploring my own relationship with God, with the struggle between good and evil, my own purpose.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
The side of fairytales I don’t like is that they always have happy endings, that there’s just good and evil, and things are perfect. But life is a little more complicated, and that’s what I try to teach my kids.
We’re all caught up in circumstances, and we’re all good and evil. When you’re really hungry, for instance, you’ll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing – well, maybe that’s too strong – but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.
Everyone spends their lives trying to balance their world between good and evil.
I tend to think that good and evil exist and that the quantity in each of us is unchangeable. The moral character of people is set, fixed until death.
Within a culture possessed by the myth of feminine evil, the naming, describing, and theorizing about good and evil has constituted a maze/haze of deception. The journey of women becoming is breaking through this maze – springing into free space, which is an a-mazing process.
Moral authority has been laid to rest, world opinion is no more than a game show and the difference between good and evil is about as relevant as changing channels.
The conscience of children is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe.
One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.
Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history – not only because it isn’t true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically – that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.
Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.
One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good – he and the world is saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad – he and the world is destroyed.
I believe you can make forces of good and evil work for you, to get what you want.
Rather than dividing the world between good and evil, the Left divided the world in terms of economics. Economic classes, not moral values, explained human behavior. Therefore, to cite a common example, poverty, not one’s moral value system, or lack of it, caused crime.
Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.
Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.
The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.
I feel that a world in which you only see what you want to see is incomplete. And as a game creator, I am only here to prepare a game that will expand the breadth of your thinking, and leave the decision between good and evil up to the players.
I think that fiction is an excellent place for us to struggle with questions of good and evil, and humanity and inhumanity.
Behind the man is the Tree of Life, bearing twelve fruits, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is behind the woman; the serpent is twining round it.
For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity.
While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern.
The Book of Revelation is all about the conflict, the contest between the forces of Good and Evil.
Classical tragedy was the war between good and evil. We wanted evil to be defeated and good to be victorious. But the battle in modern tragedy is between good and good. And no matter which side wins, we’ll still be heartbroken.
What ‘True Blood’ does really well is that it balances on the line between good and evil – you blur the distinction between the two.
The whole course of human history may depend on a change of heart in one solitary and even humble individual – for it is in the solitary mind and soul of the individual that the battle between good and evil is waged and ultimately won or lost.
Most of my favorite fictional couples are distinctly different. Light and dark, good and evil, boring and wild… whatever! They’re more fun to experience and definitely more fun to write. You have all these levels, and you know they’re not going to react to situations the same way.
All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.
I am perhaps a late follower of Zoroaster and I believe that the foundation of life is built upon the struggle between the two opposing forces of Good and Evil.
I don’t write about good and evil with this enormous dichotomy. I write about people. I write about people doing the kinds of things that people do.
No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
I’ll shout it if they want: Down with isms! Up with a Left that is capable of thinking outside the box! In other words, I am more than completely cured of simplifications, of dividing the world into good and evil, of thinking in black and white. I have repented!
As the culture war is about irreconcilable beliefs about God and man, right and wrong, good and evil, and is at root a religious war, it will be with us so long as men are free to act on their beliefs.
People’s character is their behaviour – we’re all capable of good and evil.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
All things, good and evil, come out, it seems, of the East. The Illuminati, like the Ismailites, dealt in allegories; and like the Mazdakites, they played with fire.
The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.
I believe there is meaning in life. I believe there is good and evil.
Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing.
The problem of good as it faces the atheist is this: Nature, which is the nuts-and-bolts reality for the atheist, has no values and thus can offer no grounding for good and evil. Values on the atheist view are subjective and contingent.
It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true.
Thrillers provide the reader with a safe escape into a dangerous world where the stakes are as high as can be imagined with unpredictable outcomes. It’s a perfect genre in which to explore hard issues of good and evil, a mirror that allows the reader to see both the good and not so good in themselves.
This is a struggle of good and evil. And we’re the good.
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