“All our talents increase in the using, and every faculty, both good and bad, strengthens by exercise: therefore, if you choose to use the bad, or those which tend to evil, till they become your masters, and neglect the good till they dwindle away, you have only yourself to blame.”
Source: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Ch. XXIII : First weeks of Matrimony; Helen to Arthur
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Anne Brontë 148
British novelist and poet 1820–1849Related quotes
“Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.”
Source: The Essential Rumi (1995), Ch. 19 : Jesus Poems
Context: The cure for pain is in the pain.
Good and bad are mixed. If you don't have both,
you don't belong with us.
Renew America rally in Alabama, April 29, 2000. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/00_04_29alrenew.htm.
2000
In an interview with Kara Swisher as quoted in Zuckerberg: The Recode interview https://www.recode.net/2018/7/18/17575156/mark-zuckerberg-interview-facebook-recode-kara-swisher (July 18, 2018), Recode.
My Day (1935–1962)
Context: What is going on in the Un-American Activities Committee worries me primarily because little people have become frightened and we find ourselves living in the atmosphere of a police state, where people close doors before they state what they think or look over their shoulders apprehensively before they express an opinion.
I have been one of those who have carried the fight for complete freedom of information in the United Nations. And while accepting the fact that some of our press, our radio commentators, our prominent citizens and our movies may at times be blamed legitimately for things they have said and done, still I feel that the fundamental right of freedom of thought and expression is essential. If you curtail what the other fellow says and does, you curtail what you yourself may say and do.
In our country we must trust the people to hear and see both the good and the bad and to choose the good. The Un-American Activities Committee seems to me to be better for a police state than for the USA. (29 October 1947)
1780s, Letter to Peter Carr (1787)
Karma yoga
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 17 November 1983.
“You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy
But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!”
Macheath in "Second Threepenny-Finale"; Act 2, scene 3, p. 67
Variant translations:
However much you twist, whatever lies you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on.
Used by the Pet Shop Boys, in "What Keeps Mankind Alive?", Can You Forgive Her (1993 EP)
Food first, then morality.
The Threepenny Opera (1928)