Irvin D. Yalom Quotes

People confuse goodness with weakness. It is weak people, not good people (goodness demands strength), who are taken advantage of.

Pharisaism is not a degeneration in a good man: a large portion of it is rather the condition of all being-good.

So many people say, "I'm a good person!" Like, why are you a good person? To be a good person you have to actively be good.

Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever.

I am wholesome.

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves.

He has a number of curious facts in illustration of the power of mere goodness to protect against outrage.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

A man without a stick will be bitten even by a sheep.

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.

I've never met anyone who is seriously bad.

I've never met an evil person ever.

All my books are an inquiry into the nature of evil. Why do good people do bad things? Are any human beings completely evil? Do we all have good within us? That's what I'm interested in.

Of course I am not evil.

Weakness is provocative.

Righteousness is on our side.

I just wanted to be angelic and pure and nice and kind.

... Treachery don't come natural to beaming youth; but trust and pity, love and constancy,-they do, thank God!

Armenag Saroyan. A good man of whom the worst that anybody was willing to say, was that he was too good for this world.

A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.

What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

Good people are found, not changed.

Guilt pins a fig-leaf; Innocence is its own adorning.

What is bad? All that proceeds from weakness