Charles Baudelaire Quotes

I suspect that here theists and atheists would agree: Human beings have within them the ability to choose evil or good. We wake up each day facing the age-old struggle of good and evil. In some situations, mental illness clouds our judgment.

Evil is always possible. Goodness is a difficulty.

No one who is in this world will deny that evils exist. What, then, do we say? That evil is not a living and animated substance, but a condition of the soul which is opposed to virtue and which springs up In the slothful because of their falling away from good.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

Men have the power of thinking that they may avoid sin.

The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Human nature is evil, and goodness is caused by intentional activity.

Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses to be bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

From the days of Cain and Abel, we know all too well there will always be evil. But that evil shouldn't take away our freedoms.

When virtue is at liberty, so to some extent is vice.

The eternal conflict of good and the best with bad and the worst is on.

It is not easy to do something good, but it is extremely difficult to do something bad.

I think it's extremely difficult consistently being a decent human being.

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise.

Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.

There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

The mediation by the serpent was necessary. Evil can seduce man, but cannot become man.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

That is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not present.

In this life, it's not hard to do wrong.

The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.

The struggle for morality never stays won. It's always in process.

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.