good quotes

A. J. Muste: 

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

Albert Einstein: 

The ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. . . . The ordinary objects of human endeavour -- property, outward success, luxury -- have always seemed to me contemptible.

Albert Schweitzer: 

Anyone who proposes to do good must not expect people to roll stones out of his way, but must accept his lot calmly if they even roll a few more upon it.

Albert Schweitzer: 

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Alex Noble: 

If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.

Alexander Pope: 

Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.

Anne Frank: 

In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.

Benjamin Haydon: 

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Blaise Pascal: 

We know the truth, not only by the reason, but by the heart.

Charles Dickens: 

Charity begins at home and justice begins next door.

Cicero: 

The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.

Confucius: 

He who wishes to secure the good of others, has already secured his own.

Dorothy Rowe: 

We would like to believe that we are not in the business of surviving but in being good, and we do not like to admit to ourselves that we are good in order to survive.

Edmund Burke: 

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.

Elbert Hubbard: 

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one. 
The Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923


Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 

Good critics, who have stamped out poets' hope,
Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state,
Good patriots, who for a theory risked a cause.

George Orwell: 

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

H. L. Mencken: 

In the United States, doing good has come to be, like patriotism, a favorite device of persons with something to sell.

Henry Brooks Adam: 

It is always good men who do the most harm in the world.

Isaac Asimov: 

Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right.

Isocrates: 

The noblest worship is to make yourself as good and as just as you can.

Jane Addams: 

The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.

Jane Addams: 

We have learned to say that the good must be extended to all of society before it can be held secure by any one person or any one class. But we have not yet learned to add to that statement, that unless all [people] and all classes contribute to a good, we cannot even be sure that it is worth having.

John Lovejoy Elliott: 

I have known many good people who did not believe in God. But I have never known a human being who was good who did not believe in people. [language slightly modified]

John Wesley: 

Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

Mairead Maguire: 

\We frail humans are at one time capable of the greatest good and, at the same time, capable of the greatest evil. Change will only come about when each of us takes up the daily struggle ourselves to be more forgiving, compassionate, loving, and above all joyful in the knowledge that, by some miracle of grace, we can change as those around us can change too.

Mary Wollstonecraft: 

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

Matthew Henry: 

Goodness makes greatness truly valuable, and greatness make goodness much more serviceable.

Mohammed: 

Our true wealth is the good we do in this world. None of us has faith unless we desire for our neighbors what we desire for ourselves.

Oscar Wilde: 

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.

Paramahansa Yogananda: 

Life has a bright side and a dark side, for the world of relativity is composed of light and shadows. If you permit your thoughts to dwell on evil, you yourself will become ugly. Look only for the good in everything so you absorb the quality of beauty.

Paul Ricoeur: 

The moral law commands us to make the highest possible good in a world the final object of all our conduct.

Plato: 

Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: 

Do not waste yourself in rejection, nor bark against the bad, but chant the beauty of the good.

Rene Descartes: 

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Robert Heinlein: 

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

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.

Rudyard Kipling: 

I always try to believe the best of everybody -- it saves so much trouble.

Sydney J. Harris: 

Patriotism is proud of a country's virtues and eager to correct its deficiencies; it also acknowledges the legitimate patriotism of other countries, with their own specific virtues. The pride of nationalism, however, trumpets its country's virtues and denies its deficiencies, while it is contemptuous toward the virtues of other countries. It wants to be, and proclaims itself to be, "the greatest," but greatness is not required of a country; only goodness is.

Theodore Parker: 

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice. Things refuse to be mismanaged long.

Thomas Paine: 

My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.

Unknown: 

In this world everything changes except good deeds and bad deeds; these follow you as the shadow follows the body.

Vaclav Havel: 

Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed.

William James: 

[T]he true is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as the right is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.

William Penn: 

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

William Shakespeare: 

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.