“Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.”
John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer
The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1956 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)
Source: Soldiers Live (2000), Chapter 10, “An Abode of Ravens: Recovery” (p. 397)
“Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil not the strength to choose between the two.”
John Cheever (1912–1982) American novelist and short story writer
The Late Forties and the Fifties, 1956 entry.
The Journals of John Cheever (1991)
Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology
Here's the key: You know you're vulnerable. No other animal knows that. You know what hurts you, because you're vulnerable. And now that you know what hurts you, you can figure out what hurts someone else. And as soon as you know what can hurt someone as, and you can use that, then you have the knowledge of good and evil. Well it's a pretty good trick that the snake pulled because it doesn't seem like the thing that we would have exactly wanted if we knew what the consequence was going to be. As soon as a human being is self conscious and aware of his nakedness, then he has the capacity for evil. That's introduced into the world right at that point."
Concepts
Franz Kafka book The Blue Octavo Notebooks
The First Octavo Notebook https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gD981HZ190BUJF-3czZNX3DsFWvqp3cq-Z4QS4d-9gw/edit?hl=en <br class="br">The Blue Octavo Notebooks (1954)
“The only good is knowledge, and the only evil is ignorance.”
Herodotus (-484–-425 BC) ancient Greek historian, often considered as the first historian
The words of Socrates, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius.
Misattributed
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”
Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher
Socrates II: xxxi http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=D.+L.+2.5.31&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0257#note-link14. Original Greek: ἓν μόνον ἀγαθὸν εἶναι, τὴν ἐπιστήμην, καὶ ἓν μόνον κακόν, τὴν ἀμαθίαν <br class="br">Diogenes Laertius <br class="br">Variant: The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
The Serpent, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)
Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist
Address at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999) <br class="br">This comment is modified in a later article derived from these talks:<br>:Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.<br>:* "A Designer Universe?" at PhysLink.com http://www.physlink.com/Education/essay_weinberg.cfm
Sallustius Roman philosopher and writer
XII. The origin of evil things; and that there is no positive evil.
On the Gods and the Cosmos