Gustave Flaubert Quotes

When people see some things as good, other things become bad.

No action is in itself good or bad, but only such according to convention.

It's simply untrue that religion provides the only framework for a universal morality.

Nobody is all good or all bad.

Evil exists to glorify the good. Evil is negative good. It is a relative term. Evil can be transmuted into good. What is evil to one at one time, becomes good at another time to somebody else.

Conservatives divide the world in terms of good and evil while liberals do it in terms of the rich and poor.

How well I have learned that there is no fence to sit on between heaven and hell. There is a deep, wide gulf, a chasm, and in that chasm is no place for any man.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Relativity must replace absolutism in the realm of morals as well as in the spheres of physics and biology.

Men are not altogether bad or altogether good.

One sees in Latin America, and also elsewhere, among many Catholics a certain schizophrenia between individual and public morality.

These youngsters hold that all morality is relative but that middle class morality is just plain bad.

All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal.

Good and evil exists everywhere.

Mankind divides itself into two classes,--benefactors and malefactors. The second class is vast; the first a handful.

The war of good and evil present in all religions does not always end, in every faith, with the victory of good, but in every one it establishes a clear order of existence. The sacred as well as the profane rests on that universal order.

The most striking feature if this map is the stark fat of the Two Roads. There is the road that leads to Life, and there is the road that leads to Death. There is Good, and there is Evil. There is Right and there is Wrong.

There is an old illusion. It is called good and evil.

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

The problem was, you couldn't have one without the other. There couldn't be a bad guy unless there was a good guy to create the standard. And there couldn't be a good guy until a bad guy showed just how far off the path he might stray.

I believe it's true that there's good and evil in everyone and it's a constant struggle to have your better angels prevail.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.