There are some forms of religion that are bad; just as there’s bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.
—Karen Armstrong
It is good that fire should burn, even if it consumes your house; it is good that force should crush, even if it crushes you; it is good that rain should fall, even if it destroys your crops and floods your land. Plagues and pestilences attest to the constancy of natural law. They set us to cleaning our streets and houses and to readjusting our relations to outward nature. Only in a live universe could disease and death prevail. Death is a phase of life, a redistributing of the type. Decay is another kind of growth.
—John Burroughs
You want to believe in black and white, good and evil, heroes that are truly heroic, villains that are just plain bad, but I’ve learned in the past year that things are rarely so simple. The good guys can do some truly awful things, and the bad guys can sometimes surprise the heck out of you.
—Karen Marie Moning in Darkfever
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
—Steven Weinberg
He who stops being better stops being good.
—Oliver Cromwell
Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.
—Baltasar Gracián
If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.
—Anna Quindlen
Where humor is concerned there are no standards—no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will.
—John Kenneth Galbraith
Is it really so difficult to tell a good action from a bad one? I think one usually knows right away or a moment afterward, in a horrid flash of regret.
—Mary McCarthy
No good deed goes unpunished.
—Clare Booth Luce
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
—Soren Kierkegaard
The most painful moral struggles are not those between good and evil, but between the good and the lesser good.
—Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart.… This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of hearts, there remains… an uprooted small corner of evil.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
There is a difference between saying goodbye and letting go. Goodbye is not permanent. You can meet years later and share what happened in your life. You can smile and laugh about all the nonsense that you both went through. However, letting go is being okay with never seeing this person ever again… being okay with never knowing how their life turned out… being okay with fifty or more years of silence… being okay with running into that person at a grocery store and having them not acknowledge your presence. This is the part of life that doesn't sit well with me and never will. It tears my heart in pieces, robs me of gratitude, drains me of anything positive and eats at the faith that holds on.
—Shannon L. Alder
I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?
—Gabrielle Zevin in Elsewhere