Nathaniel Hawthorne Quotes

As therefore the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of good and evil?

Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is concrete.

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?

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?

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.

To do evil that good may come of it is for bunglers in politics as well as morals.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Perhaps this is the only real evil left.

Why are we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that.

We are very wrong to think that some fault or other can exclude virtue, or to consider the alliance of good and evil as a monstrosity or an enigma.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains.

Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.

But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

These arguments on each side (and many more might be produced) are so plausible, that I am apt to suspect, they may, the one as well as the other, be solid and satisfactory, and that reason and sentiment concur in almost all moral determinations and conclusions.

Sanity is all that stands between good and evil.

One way to determine if a view is inadequate is to check its consequences in particular cases, sometimes extreme ones, but if someone always decided what the result should be in any case by applying the given view itself, this would preclude discovering it did not correctly fit the case. Readers who hold they would plug in to the machine should notice whether their first impulse was not to do so, followed later by the thought that since only experiences could matter, the machine would be all right after all.

Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.

The potential of greater good goes right along with the potential for greater evil.

We are fundamentally good, and evil is an aberration.

Inability to tell good from evil is the greatest worry of man's life.

A man who knows all goods and all truths, as many as can be known, but does not shun evils, knows nothing.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.