Matthieu Ricard Quotes

What would our world be like if we ceased to worry about 'right' and 'wrong,' or 'good' and 'evil,' and simply acted so as to maximize well-being, our own and that of others? Would we lose anything important?

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

All pantheism must ultimately be shipwrecked on the inescapable demands of ethics, and then on the evil and suffering of the world. If the world is a theophany , then everything done by man, and even by animal, is equally divine and excellent; nothing can be more censurable and nothing more praiseworthy than anything else; hence there is no ethics.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Virtue and Happiness are Mother and Daughter.

Ethics occupies a central place in philosophy because it is concerned with sin, with the origin of good and evil and with moral valuations. And since these problems have a universal significance, the sphere of ethics is wider than is generally supposed. It deals with meaning and value and its province is the world in which the distinction between good and evil is drawn, evaluations are made and meaning is sought.

Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

Good is that which promotes life, evil is that which destroys life

No one has a right to happiness.

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.

It is in everybody's interest to seek those [actions] that lead to happiness and avoid those which lead to suffering. And because our interests are inextricably linked, we are compelled to accept ethics as the indispensable interface between my desire to be happy and yours.

You must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

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.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

I don't subscribe to any particular doctrine or ideology. I just think that there's kind of a good and bad, the good being life in its purest, happiest form, and the other being the darker side of existence.

Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.

I'm enormously interested to see where neuroscience can take us in understanding these complexities of the human brain and how it works, but I do think there may be limits in terms of what science can tell us about what does good and evil mean anyway, and what are those concepts about?

Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

War is always a matter of doing evil in the hope that good may come of it.