Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

I feel it's in people's nature to want to stop evil and embrace the good.

The trouble when you die is that everyone says you were nice. I would like to be thought of as genuinely nice. I would like there to be people who can honestly say, 'Len! Oh yeah, there was more good than bad in him.'

I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.

I've never met an evil person ever.

Human beings are capable of great good, but also of the basest evil.

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

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

In what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness, too often unnoted and invisible.

To me, the thing that is worse than death is betrayal.

I'm pro-life, in the sense that chaos seems like life to me and order seems like death.

Angels and demons were identical--interchangeable archetypes--all a matter of polarity. The guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer.

It is higher and nobler to be kind.

I am not a monster. I'm not all bad. Maybe 10 percent. I think I'm 90 percent good.

"Surely so many countries can't all be worth dying for." "Anything worth living for," said Nately, "is worth dying for." "And anything worth dying for," answered the sacrilegious old man, "is certainly worth living for."

There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.

Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.

He kills people. Now I'm no expert, but doesn't that make you a bad person?" Jamie glared at Nick. "You've killed a lot more people than he has. What does that make you?" "Not a person," Nick murmured, not sounding particularly interested. "Surely you remember.

We've had to deal with so many complications. We're still dealing with them. And what can we do? Nothing - well, unless we take your side's point of view and make deals with the devil. But why? Why can't we make deals with God? People do all the time. 'God, if you do this for me, I promise to be good.' Stuff like that. Yeah, but I don't see any contracts like you guys have. No hard evidence that it works. How come we can only get things we want by being bad? Why can't we get them by being good?

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.

Fulfillment in life is loving a good woman and killing a bad man.

Good is to bee sought out, and evill attended.

You can fold up spiritually, morally, or intellectually and still be safe. Because at the very worst, all you can be is dead —and for him who is the Resurrection and the Life, that just makes you his cup of tea.