Seyyed Hossein Nasr Quotes

Everywhere the human soul stands between a hemisphere of light and another of darkness; on the confines of the two everlasting empires, necessity and free will.

Mankind is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

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.

Every human life involves an unfathomable mystery, for man is the riddle of the universe, and the riddle of man in his endowment with personal capacities.

Every man is as heaven made him, and sometimes a great deal worse.

You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from - it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

Men never do good unless necessity drives them to it.

We have to believe in free will. We’ve got no choice.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Government can try to make the world a little better, but can we alter the human condition? No. We can't make saints out of sinners. St. Augustine had something to say about that.

Man can, indeed, act contrarily to the decrees of God, as far as they have been written like laws in the minds of ourselves or the prophets, but against that eternal decree of God, which is written in universal nature ...

I don't believe that pure evil exists, personally.

God and the devil are inherent in each of us. It's our choice to make: you can take the road to good, you can take the road to bad. Well, we have a choice.

Humans seem to be programmed to think of ambivalent feelings at the same time. That is the driving force behind human beings: to be the warrant of all things and to control other worlds.

Mike and I are always drawn to the idea that there is light and dark inside every being, rather than the old two-dimensional trope of good versus evil.

People are not born evil, although we all have evil within us.

Everythings a choice. Nobody's born good. Nobody's born evil. It's always a choice.

Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.

The need to raise itself above humanity is humanity's main characteristic.

A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he dont want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It aint the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it.

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.