“… intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over…”
John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)
“… intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over…”
John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent
Source: The Winter of Our Discontent
“Nothing is really good or bad in itself — it’s all what a person thinks about it.”
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet
“States are doomed when they are unable to distinguish good men from bad.”
Antisthenes (-444–-365 BC) Greek philosopher
§ 5
From Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius
“In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention.”
Bonam quippe intentionem, hoc est, rectam in se dicimus, operationem vero non quod boni aliquid in se suscipiat, sed quod ex bona intentione procedat. Unde et ab eodem homine cum in diversis temporibus idem fiat, pro diversitate tamen intentione eius operatio modo bono modo mala dicitur.
Peter Abelard (1079–1142) French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician
Ethica, seu Scito Teipsum, Bk. 1; translation by D E Luscombe from Peter Abelard's Ethics (1971) p. 53
Context: In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention. Whence when the same thing is done by the same man at different times, by the diversity of his intention, however, his action is now said to be good, now bad.
Paul Auster (1947) novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter
Paul Auster, Man In The Dark, New York: Henry Holt and Company, p. 63.
Man In The Dark (2008)
“To be good and lead a good life means to give to others more than one takes from them.”
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer
Source: The First Step (1892), Ch. VII
“We make our own luck. And it’s my responsibility to see it’s good and not bad.”
Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga
Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Falling Free (1988), Chapter 11 (p. 194)
Arthur C. Clarke book Breaking Strain
Breaking Strain, p. 170
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)