“The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.”
Of Courage, Chap. xxix.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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Epictetus 175
philosopher from Ancient Greece 50–138Related quotes
Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part III, Ch.10
“There is a certain kind of morality which is even more alien to good and evil than amorality is.”
“The responsibility of writers,” p. 169
On Science, Necessity, and the Love of God (1968)
“Conquering evil, not the opponent, is the essence of swordsmanship.”
As quoted in Behold the Second Horseman (2005), by Joseph Lumpkin, p. 44.
5 - 6
Auxiliaries to the Perception of Intelligible Natures
Context: Soul, indeed, is a certain medium between an impartible essence, and an essence which is divisible about bodies. But intellect is an impartible essence alone. And qualities and material forms are divisible about bodies.
Not everything which acts on another, effects that which it does effect by approximation and contact; but those natures which effect any thing by approximation and contact, use approximation accidentally.
The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
“Good fortune and a good disposition are rarely given to the same man.”
Book XXX, sec. 42
History of Rome
Seventh Thesis
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Context: To a high degree we are, through art and science, cultured. We are civilized — perhaps too much for our own good — in all sorts of social grace and decorum. But to consider ourselves as having reached morality — for that, much is lacking. The ideal of morality belongs to culture; its use for some simulacrum of morality in the love of honor and outward decorum constitutes mere civilization. So long as states waste their forces in vain and violent self-expansion, and thereby constantly thwart the slow efforts to improve the minds of their citizens by even withdrawing all support from them, nothing in the way of a moral order is to be expected. For such an end, a long internal working of each political body toward the education of its citizens is required. Everything good that is not based on a morally good disposition, however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until, in the way I have described, it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.
p, 125
Spiritualism and the Christian Faith (1918)
“See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good.”