Quotes about goodness
page 14

“There are so many highly esteemed ones who became miserable and humiliated just because of their bad temper and morals; and humble people who have attained eminence and the highest honors because of good temper and morals.”

Ali (601–661) cousin and son-in-law of the Islamic prophet Muhammad

Majlisi, Bihārul Anwār, vol. 71, p. 396

People

“These unhappy agents found what had already been found in abundance on Earth—a nightmare of meaningless without end. The bounties of space, of infinite outwardness, were three: empty heroics, low comedy, and pointless death.
Outwardness lost, at last, its imagined attractions.
Only inwardness remained to be explored.
Only the human soul remained terra incognita.
This was the beginning of goodness and wisdom.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 8)

Death, Wisdom, Soul, Imagination

“You can’t believe something like that is happening to you; meeting the President of Ireland and the spectacle of the parade. And everyone is so nice. They all feel like they know you. That’s the nice thing about being in something that’s as universally recognised as Star Wars. Parents normally tell kids ‘Don’t talk to strangers’, but everyone thinks they know me, wherever I go.
I embrace being the more Obi-Wan like character, because that’s the natural progression of life.
There was a period after Return of the Jedi when Star Wars had not come back. These movies are timeless, not dated by their cars or fashions. So, you have these fans who are parents with young children who have just seen Star Wars for the first time and think we made it two weeks ago. The parents say, ‘Look who it is, it’s Luke Skywalker!’ And there I am at 50, and the child is aghast. ‘What happened to this guy, he really let himself go!’ It’s natural and good to see the ageing process. So at least now, when they see me, it’s OK because they’ve seen me in the current film rather than thinking about me in my 20s.”

Mark Hamill (1951) American actor, voice actor, producer, director, and writer

6 April 2018 interview with Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/mark-hamill-interview-star-wars-last-jedi-luke-skywalker-leaving-a8292541.html

Life, War, Children, Age

“It is the most foolish of all errors for young people of good intelligence to imagine that they will forfeit their originality if they acknowledge truth already acknowledged by others.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Der thörigste von allen Irrthümern ist, wenn junge gute Köpfe glauben, ihre Originalität zu verlieren, indem sie das Wahre anerkennen, was von andern schon anerkannt worden.
Maxim 254, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

People, Truth, Error, Imagination

“The truth is, he's a nasty guy. He was so nice to me. I mean, I knew it. I was watching. I kept saying, 'Come on Ted. Let's go, okay.' But he's a nasty guy. Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him. Nobody likes him anywhere once they get to know him. He's a very –- he's got an edge that's not good. You can't make deals with people like that and it's not a good thing. It's not a good thing for the country. Very nasty guy.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

About Ted Cruz in an interview on This Week http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/01/17/donald_trump_ted_cruz_is_a_nasty_guy_nobody_likes_him.html (January 17, 2016) 2010s, 2016, January

People, Truth, Guy, Country

“People here are always asking me, "Can you play 'Lips Like Sugar' on an acoustic guitar?" And I'm like, "No!" It was an OK song, I suppose, but it didn't sound like us. We just got sucked into a new mentality on that last album, the sound of Radio America. It did great here, but by then I just thought we weren't good enough any more. It was pretty happening, the States was building and building but it didn't feel good on stage. We weren't really communicating as mates and stuff. I mean, I was used to believing that we were the best group going.”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Describing what American's always ask him.
Q magazine (1992)

People, Feeling, Communication

“The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds! You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

"The Danger of Lying in Bed" (1871)

Nature, Chance

“Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

1970s Source: Douglas C. McGill, ART PEOPLE http://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/03/arts/art-people.html, New York Times, October 3, 1986

Life, War, Nature, Strong

“For cruelty to animals, vegetarianism is the great thing to get rid of that. For the planet, to prevent depleting the water and the land and everything, it’s a great idea. And I think it’s a great thing for your health, and doctors nowadays agree with that. There are plenty of great books and organizations, so no matter where you are, there is someone to help you. That’s your first step, and I think your second step is just look in the supermarket for good vegetarian food, and I think it’s so much more readily available now.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

Sir Paul McCartney and PETA VP Dan Mathews Reflect on Two Decades of Activism http://www.peta.org/features/paul-mccartney-interview/ (April 2005)

Health, Books, Food, Idea

“For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.”
Honesta turpitudo est pro causa bona.

Publilio Siro Latin writer

Maxim 207
Sentences

“Marcos is all the exploited, marginalised, oppressed minorities resisting and saying "Enough!" He is every minority who is now beginning to speak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He is every untolerated group searching for a way to speak. Everything that makes power and the good consciences of those in power uncomfortable — this is Marcos.”

Subcomandante Marcos (1957) Mexican activist

" The Majority Disguised as the Resented Minority http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16118" (31 May 1994)

Way, Search

“Faith has a saving connection with Christ. Christ is on the shore, so to speak, holding the rope, and as we lay hold of it with the hand of our confidence, He pulls us to shore; but all good works having no connection with Christ are drifted along down the gulf of fell despair.”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 228.

Faith, Confidence, Christ, Despair

“"Mashups […] nobody's going to listen to mashups in another ten years. Mashups are novelty music. They're like "The Monster Mash." They have no musical staying power. You're pursuing a phantom there. It's bad music, I mean, it's not bad— it's a pastiche, it's like magazine collage— which can be good for what it is. But to pretend that that's like tremendous creative work— No! It's a tremendous creative power— and it can have a tremendous audience, but it's not tremendously good. And we need a little bit of aesthetic honesty in confronting things like this. Just because it's new, and people with laptops can do it, and get away with it, and find an audience for it, does not make it a real cultural advance. It's an epiphenomenon."”

Bruce Sterling (1954) American writer, speaker, futurist, and design instructor

in SXSW 2007  Bruce Sterling Rant (2007).

People, Music

“Rule over the occupied territories would have social repercussions. After a few years there would be no Jewish workers or Jewish farmers. The Arabs would be the working people and the Jews the administrators, inspectors, officials, and police—mainly secret police. A state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions. The corruption characteristic of every colonial regime would also prevail in the state of Israel. The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other. There is also good reason to fear that the Israel Defense Force, which has been until now a people's army, would, as a result of being transformed into an army of occupation, degenerate, and its commanders, who will have become military governors, resemble their colleagues in other nations.Out of concern for the Jewish people and its state we have no choice but to withdraw from the territories and their population of one and a half million Arabs.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"The Territories" (1968)

Hostility, People, Secret, Education

“It's not about how you look, it's about how you feel. I can do more with ease and grace now at 52 than I could when I was 20. I can ride my bike 60 miles, I can handle stress, I have good muscle tone. That's what it's about. Not about being thin but about being healthy”

Jane Fonda (1937) American actress and activist

Telephone interview quoted by Carol Krucoff. Why Jane's Fonda Exercise;Stress-Busting Workouts and Other News About Staying in Shape. Washington Post, 13 March 1990

Feeling

“The deep conviction... that nothing good for Germany or the world can come out of the present German regime, has made me avoid the country in whose spiritual tradition I am more deeply rooted than are those who for three years have been trying to find courage enough to declare before the world that I am not a German. And I feel to the bottom of my heart that I have done right in the eyes of my contemporaries and of posterity.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Responding to anti-semitic propaganda and to criticisms of German writers living in exile during the early years of the Nazi regime in Germany, as quoted in "Homage to Thomas Mann" in The New Republic (1 April 1936) http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114269/thomas-mann-stands-anti-semitism-stacks

World, Feeling, Courage, Heart

“Marry a good man, and bear good children.”

Leonidas I king of Sparta

In response to his wife's question of what she should do if he died in battle, as he left for Thermopylae; as quoted in the "Sayings of the Spartan Women" http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Sayings_of_Spartan_Women*.html in the Moralia Variant translation: Marry a good man, and have good children.

Children

“Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

Ole-Lukøie
Fairy Tales (1835)

Children, Beauty, Dreams, Sleep

“I think our preparation has been good, we’ve worked extremely hard individually and as a team, and when it’s come to games the guys have stepped up and performed under pressure. That’s exactly what we need if we are to be very successful at this tournament. Under pressure the bowlers performed very well at the death, but now it’s about doing it when it counts. The best thing is we’ve got these experiences to call on when the tournament starts and we’re actually under real pressure when it really matters. Fingers crossed the guys can take all that confidence forward into the group games.”

Joe Root (1990) English cricketer

On World T20, "World T20: Joe Root challenges England squad to keep their cool in India" http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/mar/14/world-t20-england-india-mumbai, March 14, 2016. Steve Smith

Death, Guy, Confidence, Game

“How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Books, Suffering

“Our air up here is good for the disease — I mean good against the disease,… but it is also good for the disease.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 4

Disease

“One of the things you want to do with a conception like compassion is that you want to start thinking about it like a psychologist, or like a scientist, because compassion is actually definable. The easiest way to approach it is to think about it in Big-5 terms, because it maps onto Agreeableness, which you can break down into Compassion and Politeness. The liberal types, especially the Social Justice types, are way higher in Compassion. It's actually their fundamental characteristic. You might think, 'well, compassion is a virtue.' Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child, hey great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way. We don't want to be thinking for a second that compassion isn't a virtue that can lead to violence, because it certainly can. The other problem with compassion - this is why we have conscientiousness - there's five canonical personality dimensions. Agreeableness is good if you are functioning in a kin system. You want to distribute resources equally for example among your children, because you want all of them to have the same chance, and even roughly the same outcome. That is, a good one. But the problem is that you can't extend that moral network to larger groups. As far as I can tell, you need conscientiousness, which is a much colder virtue. It's also a virtue that is much more concerned with larger structures over the longer period of time. And you can think about conscientiousness as a form of compassion too. It's like: 'straighten the hell out, and work hard and your life will go well. I don't care how you feel about that right now.' Someone who's cold, that is, low in agreeableness and high in conscientiousness, will tell you every time. 'Don't come whining to me. I don't care about your hurt feelings. Do your goddamn job or you're going to be out on the street.' One might think, 'Oh that person is being really hard on me.' Not necessarily. They might have your long term best interest in mind. You're fortunate if you come across someone who is disagreeable. Not tyrannically disagreeable, but moderately disagreeable and high in conscientiousness because they will whip you into shape. And that's really helpful. You'll admire people like that. You won't be able to help it. You'll feel like, 'Oh wow, this person has actually given me good information, even though you will feel like a slug after they have taken you apart.' That's the compassion issue. You can't just transform that into a political stance. I think part of what we're seeing is actually the rise of a form of female totalitarianism, because we have no idea what totalitarianism would be like if women ran it, because that's never happened before in the history of the planet. And so, we've introduced women into the political sphere radically over the past fifty years. We have no idea what the consequence of that is going to be. But we do know from our research, which is preliminary, that agreeableness really predicts political correctness, but female gender predicts over and above the personality trait, and that's something we found very rarely in our research. Usually the sex differences are wiped out by the personality differences, but not in this particular case. On top of that, women are getting married later, and they're having children much later, and they're having fewer of them, and so you also have to wonder what their feminine orientation is doing with itself in the interim, roughly speaking. A lot of it is being expressed as political opinion. Fair enough. That's fine. But it's not fine when it starts to shut down discussion.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Concepts

Life, Women, Children, People

“I'm not going to tell you I am a good father. I have to contribute to the world. I have to teach [my children] how to contribute to the world. That’s our whole existence – to contribute to the world and make it a better place in some way. In my life I contributed to make it a bad place.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=2083509&type=story On his family

Life, Children, World, Way

“Underlying the concept of positivity is the conviction that the positive is intrinsically positive in itself, without anyone pausing to ask what is to be regarded as positive. … It is significant and really quite interesting that the term 'positive' actually contains this ambivalence. On the one hand, 'positive' means what is given, is postulated, is there—as when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to the facts. But, equally, 'positive' also refers to the good, the approvable, in a certain sense, the ideal. And I imagine that this semantic constellation expresses with precision what countless people actually feel to be the case.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965-66), p. 18

People, Feeling, Imagination, Sense

“There is a certain confidence that a newsreader exudes while reading the stories in a staccato manner. Although my Hindi is good, I realised that the one they speak is chaste. I tried reading from the teleprompter at the set, but I felt that I need to polish my reading skills to make it sound as close to that of a newsreader's. Since then, I've been reading a lot of Hindi papers and watching news channels.”

Sukirti Kandpal (1987) Indian actress

Sukirti Kandpal on playing a journalist in Dilli Wali Thakur Gurls https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tv/news/hindi/Why-Sukirti-Kandpal-is-chasing-the-media/articleshow/46665042.cms/

Confidence, Reading

“It's good to be back filming. I just put on my glasses and then I became Harry again.”

Daniel Radcliffe (1989) English actor

https://archive.is/20130628114347/www.associatedcontent.com/article/274090/daniel_radcliffe_quotes_harry_potter.html

“I admire the proud and cold who go adventuring on the paths of great and demoniac beauty, and scorn "man" — but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet out of a man of letters, it is this plebeian love of mine for the human, living, and commonplace. All warmth, all goodness, all humor is born of it, and it almost seems to me as if it were that love itself, of which it is written that a man might speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and yet without it be no more than sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

Thomas Mann book Tonio Kröger

Source: Tonio Kröger (1903), Ch. 9, as translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan

Love, Men, Beauty, Angels

“…faith and repentance, i. e. believing Jesus to be the Messiah, and a good life, are the indispensable conditions of the new covenant, to be performed by all those who would obtain eternal life. (The reasonableness, or rather necessity of which, that we may the better comprehend, we must a little look back to what was said in the beginning”

John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician

§ 106
The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695)

Life, Faith

“Dear Reader: The title of this book is composed of three words from my novel Cat's Cradle. A wampeter is an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve. The Holy Grail would be a case in point. Foma are harmless untruths, intended to comfort simple souls. An example: "Prosperity is just around the corner." A granfalloon is a proud and meaningless association of human beings. Taken together, the words form as good an umbrella as any for this collection of some of the reviews and essays I've written, a few of the speeches I made.”

Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) American writer

"Preface"
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)

People, Books, Soul, Cats

“Ethics, too, are nothing but reverence for life. That is what gives me the fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, promoting, and enhancing life, and that destroying, injuring, and limiting life are evil.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Kulturphilosophie (1923), Vol. 2 : Civilization and Ethics

Life, Evil

“Such arguments ill become us, since the time of reformation came, under Gospel light. All distinctions of nations, and privileges of one above others, are ceased; Christians are taught to account all men their neighbours; and love their neighbours as themselves; and do to all men as they would be done by; to do good to all men; and Man-stealing is ranked with enormous crimes. Is the barbarous enslaving our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with all these Divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us, would we think it just?—One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more than Reason, or the Bible.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

Love, Men, Thinking, Light

“The large-eyed daughter of Kuntibhoja, Pritha by name, was endued with beauty and every accomplishment. Of rigid vows, she was devoted to virtue and possessed of every good quality. Her father Kuntibhoja invited, O best of monarchs, the princes and kings of other countries and desired his daughter to select her husband from among her guests. The intelligent Kunti, entering the amphitheatre, beheld Pandu--the foremost of the Bharatas… The amiable daughter of Kuntibhoja… advancing with modesty,…placed the nuptial garland about Pandu's neck.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Mahabharata translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli in: Mahabharata/Book 1: Adi Parva/Section CXII https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mahabharata/Book_1:_Adi_Parva/Section_CXIIThe, Wikisource

Beauty, Intelligence, Daughters, Country

“My friends and relations … urged … that the quantity [of food] I took was too little for one so advanced in years; against this, I urged that nature was content with little, and that with this small quantity, I had preserved myself for many years in health and activity, that I believed as a man advanced in years, his stomach grew weaker, and therefore the tendency should be to lessen the amount of food rather than to increase. I further reminded them of the two proverbs, which say; he who has a mind to eat a great deal, must eat but little; eating little makes life long, and, living long, he must eat much; and the other proverb was: that, what we leave after making a hearty meal, does us more good than what we have eaten.”

Luigi Cornaro (1484–1566) Italian philosopher

Discourses on the Sober Life

Life, Health, Food, Nature

“Children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions”

Alfie Kohn (1957) American author and lecturer

The Homework Myth, chap. 10

Children, Decision, Learning

“Noble be man,
Helpful and good!
For that alone
Sets hims apart
From every other creature
On earth.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Das Göttliche

Das Göttliche (The Divine) (1783)

Help

“There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before;
The evil is null, is nought, is silence implying sound;
What was good shall be good, with for evil so much good more;
On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round.”

Robert Browning (1812–1889) English poet and playwright of the Victorian Era

Abt Vogler, ix.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Silence, Evil, Perfection

“A minister of state is excusable for the harm he does when the helm of government has forced his hand in a storm; but in the calm he is guilty of all the good he does not do.”

Voltaire Le Siècle de Louis XIV

Un ministre est excusable du mal qu’il fait, lorsque le gouvernail de l’État est forcé dans sa main par les tempêtes; mais dans le calme il est coupable de tout le bien qu’il ne fait pas.
Le Siècle de Louis XIV, ch. VI: "État de la France jusqu’à la mort du cardinal Mazarin en 1661" (1752) Unsourced paraphrase or variant translation: Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.
Citas

“One night as I walked in the desert the mountains rode on my shoulders
and the sky became my heart,
and the earth - my own body, I explored.
Every object began to wink at me, and Mira wisely calculated thinking,
My charms must be at their height
now would be a good time to rush into his arms,
maybe He won't drop me so quick.”

Meera Bai Hindu mystic poet

Mira Bai, Love Poems from God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West http://books.google.co.in/books?id=ENaRTjQRMaIC&pg=PT329

Mountain, Thinking, Time, Heart

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables”. We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love, Life, Truth, Faith

“There's a category for me. I like to be referred to as a good singer of good songs in good taste.”

Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990) American jazz singer

Interview, The Hollywood Reporter, 1974

“He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.”

Rabindranath Tagore Stray Birds

88
Stray Birds (1916)

Love

“The intellect and the heart are on good terms with one another. One often represents the other so perfectly, that it is hard to determine which of the two was at work.”

Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916) Austrian writer

Der Verstand und das Herz stehen auf sehr gutem Fuße. Eines vertritt oft die Stelle des andern so vollkommen, dass es schwer ist zu entscheiden, welches von beiden tätig war.
Source: Aphorisms (1880/1893), p. 42.

Heart

“Alas, how can the poor souls live in Concord when you preachers sow amongst them in your sermons debate and discord? They look to you for light and you bring them darkness. Amend these crimes, I exhort you, and set forth God's word truly, both by true preaching and giving a good example, or else, I, whom God has appointed his vicar and high minister here, will see these divisions extinct, and these enormities corrected…”

Henry VIII of England (1491–1547) King of England from 1509 until 1547

Last speech to parliament, December 24, 1545. http://englishhistory.net/tudor/h8speech.html See also: Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, Great Britain. Public Record Office, John Sherren Brewer, Robert Henry, vol. XX, part 2, p. 513. http://books.google.com/books?id=oBsFAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA4-PA513&dq=%22I,+whom+God+has+appointed+his+vicar+and+high+minister+%22&lr=

God, Soul, Light

“To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.”

Jasper Johns (1930) American artist

as quoted in photo-exhibition 'Cy Twombly', museum Marseille Amsterdam, autumn 2008
2000s

“O Man, who will discern in this work of mine the wonderful works of Nature, if you think it would be a criminal thing to destroy it, reflect how much more criminal it is to take the life of a man; and if this, his external form, appears to thee marvellously constructed, remember that it is nothing as compared with the soul that dwells in that structure; for that indeed, be it what it may, is a thing divine. Leave it then to dwell in His work at His good will and pleasure, and let not your rage or malice destroy a life — for indeed, he who does not value it, does not himself deserve it.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Life, Pleasure, Soul, Nature

“I present you with a Key : I have not heard of the like yet framed, since it pleased God to bring that mighty continent of America to light. Others of my countrymen have often, and excellently, and lately, written of the country, and none that I know beyond the goodness and worth of it.
This Key respects the native language of it, and happily may unlock some rarities concerning the natives themselves, not yet discovered.”

Roger Williams (theologian) (1603–1684) English Protestant theologian and founder of the colony of Providence Plantation

Preface
A Key into the Language of America (1643)

God, Light, Country

“If there were just one possibility—either to do the good or to combat evil—man would have to opt for the first.”

Adrienne von Speyr (1902–1967) Swiss doctor and mystic

Source: Lumina and New Lumina (1969), p. 36

Evil

“You can live, provided you live; that is, you can live for ever, provided you live a good life.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

229H:3:2
Sermons

Life

“Say nothing good of yourself, you will be distrusted; say nothing bad of yourself, you will be taken at your word.”

Joseph Roux (1834–1905) French poet

Part 5, XXII
Meditations of a Parish Priest (1866)

“A black pall, you know, with a silver cross on it, or R. I. P. — requiescat in pace — you know. That seems to me the most beautiful expression — I like it much better than ‘He is a jolly good fellow,’ which is simply rowdy.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 5

Beauty

“If you would give every man as he deserves, then love the good and pity those who are evil.”
Vis aptam meritis uicem referre: Dilige iure bonos et miseresce malis.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (480) philosopher of the early 6th century

Poem IV, lines 11-12; translation by Richard H. Green
The Consolation of Philosophy · De Consolatione Philosophiae, Book IV

Love, Evil

“Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole life like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

ABC News Interview

Life, People, Imagination

“You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere.”

William S. Burroughs book Junkie

Junkie (1953)

“I'm young enough to still see the passionate boy I used to be.
But I'm old enough to say I got a good look at the other side.
I know we got to work real hard, maybe even for the rest of our lives.
But right now I just want to take what I can
Get tonight.While the night is still young,
I want to keep making love to you,
While the night is still young.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

The Night Is Still Young.
Song lyrics, Greatest Hits - Volume I & Volume II (1985)

Love, Making love, Boy, Passion

“Remember that time is money. He that can earn ten shillings a day by his labor, and goes abroad, or sits idle, one half of that day, though he spends but sixpence during his diversion or idleness, ought not to reckon that the only expense; he has really spent, rather thrown away, five shillings, besides.
“Remember, that credit is money. If a man lets his money lie in my hands after it is due, he gives me interest, or so much as I can make of it during that time. This amounts to a considerable sum where a man has good and large credit, and makes good use of it.
“Remember, that money is of the prolific, generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more, and so on. Five shillings turned is six, turned again it is seven and three pence, and so on, till it becomes a hundred pounds. The more there is of it, the more it produces every turning, so that the profits rise quicker and quicker. He that kills a breeding sow, destroys all her offspring to the thousandth generation. He that murders a crown, destroys all that it might have produced, even scores of pounds.”
“Remember this saying, The good paymaster is lord of another man’s purse. He that is known to pay punctually and exactly to the time he promises, may at any time, and on any occasion, raise all the money his friends can spare. This is sometimes of great use. After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse for ever.
“The most trifling actions that affect a man’s credit are to be regarded. The sound of your hammer at five in the morning, or eight at night, heard by a creditor, makes him easy six months longer; but if he sees you at a billiard table, or hears your voice at a tavern, when you should be at work, he sends for his money the next day; demands it, before he can receive it, in a lump. ‘It shows, besides, that you are mindful of what you owe; it makes you appear a careful as well as an honest man, and that still increases your credit.’
“Beware of thinking all your own that you possess, and of living accordingly. It is a mistake that many people who have credit fall into. To prevent this, keep an exact account for some time both of your expenses and your income. If you take the pains at first to mention particulars, it will have this good effect: you will discover how wonderfully small, trifling expenses mount up to large sums, and will discern what might have been, and may for the future be saved, without occasioning any great inconvenience.
“For six pounds a year you may have the use of one hundred pounds, provided you are a man of known prudence and honesty.
“He that spends a groat a day idly, spends idly above six pounds a year, which is the price for the use of one hundred pounds.
“He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day.
“He that idly loses five shillings’ worth of time, loses five shillings, and might as prudently throw five shillings into the sea.
“He that loses five shillings, not only loses that sum, but all the advantage that might be made by turning it in dealing, which by the time that a young man becomes old, will amount to a considerable sum of money.””

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Money, Pain, People, Lie

“There is a falsehood wrapped up in that statement. "In the struggle between the white man and the negro" assumes that there is a struggle, in which either the white man must enslave the negro or the negro must enslave the white. There is no such struggle! It is merely an ingenious falsehood, to degrade and brutalize the negro. Let each let the other alone, and there is no struggle about it. If it was like two wrecked seamen on a narrow plank, when each must push the other off or drown himself, I would push the negro off or a white man either, but it is not; the plank is large enough for both. This good earth is plenty broad enough for white man and negro both, and there is no need of either pushing the other off.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)

“India's education had two aims, both organically linked. One was to strengthen our body and mind, our nerves and vitality. If the Indian teaching on this subject is followed faithfully, it ensures full, vigorous, healthy and long life. Similarly, it ensures health and unimpaired senses and a mind with undiminished powers. According to the Hindu Psychology, a man's mind and senses are powers of the soul. Therefore, they should be strengthened, widened, deepened, purified. "May I see and hear clearly and abundantly", is the repeated prayer in the, several Upanishads. Another variant of this prayer is: "May our eyes see the good, our ears hear the good." To see and hear and desire better, purer, finer and deeper is the first aim of Indian education. This means strengthening character, controlling desires and impulses, increasing powers of concentration and will. Not only this opens up our hidden powers, but this is even the basis of any fruitful life at all. If our senses and mind run their unbridled course, uninformed by any higher light, they will lead to self-destruction. But purified in the light of the soul, they become a blessing.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

Life, Health, Education, Soul

“And this is probably a good place for me to end by just saying that the issue of climate change is a perfect example of why young people have to lead. Because old people, they've created a mess, and then they'll be gone. And then you -- (applause) -- you're the ones who have to deal with it. And also what happens is old people get set in their ways. So the older you get, the more likely you are to say, that's how it's always been so that's how I'm going to keep on doing it -- even if there's a better way to do things. Young people, they're asking, well, why do I have to do it that way? Let's try it this way. And that kind of willingness to accept challenges and try things in a new way, to not be stuck in the past, or to look towards the future, that's what all of you represent.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2014, Young Southeast Asian Leaders Initiative Town Hall Speech (November 2014)

People, Way, Change, Past

“All kids draw and write poetry and everything, and some of us last until we're about eighteen, but most drop off at about twelve when some guy comes up and says, "You're no good." That's all we get told all our lives. "You haven't got the ability. You're a cobbler." It happened to all of us, but if somebody had told me all my life, "Yeah, you're a great artist," I would have been a more secure person.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Source: The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 9

Life, Guy, Drawing, Personality

“Watch people like a hawk, and when they do something good, tell them.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Personality Lectures

People

“I thought it would be a good thing to be a missionary, but I thought it would be better to be First Sea Lord.”

John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (1841–1920) Royal Navy admiral of the fleet

p. 273. https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/273/mode/1up Memories (1919) https://archive.org/stream/memoriesbyadmira00fishuoft#page/n0/mode/2up

Sea

“Fortunate indeed is the man who has found wisdom and who is full of that discretion which is better than all the acquiring, trafficking, and possession of gold and silver. … I dwell (so says Wisdom) in good and salutary counsel, and am present at learned and wise cogitations. Therefore must a man seek this Wisdom and, having found it, take care to hold it well, that in its time and place it may be of help to him. The ensuing representation will set before your eyes the treatise which I have propounded.”

Philibert de l'Orme (1514–1570) French architect of the Renaissance.

Livre d'architecture as quoted by Edward Fenton, "Messer Philibert Delorme" The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin Vol. 13, No. 4, Dec., 1954

Wisdom, Learning, Time, Help

“I believe more in the goodness of bad people than i do in the badness of good people.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: A Thousand & One Epigrams: Selected from the Writings of Elbert Hubbard (1911), p. 18.

People

“The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.
And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2008, A More Perfect Union (March 2008)

Love, Men, Children, People

“Lastly, what is history for? This is perhaps a harder question than the others; a man who answers it will have to reflect rather more widely than a man who answers the three we have answered already. He must reflect not only on historical thinking but on other things as well, because to say that something is `for' something implies a distinction between A and B, where A is good for something and B is that for which something is good. But I will suggest an answer, and express the opinion that no historian would reject it, although the further questions to which it gives rise are numerous and difficult.
My answer is that history is `for' human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the man you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: The Idea of History (1946), p. 10

Men, History, Question, Nature

“In God is my being, my me, my strength, my beatitude, my good, and my delight. I say mine at present because it is not possible to speak otherwise; but I do not mean by it any such thing as me or mine, or delight or good, or strength or stability, or beatitude; nor could I possibly turn my eyes to behold such things in heaven or in earth; and if, notwithstanding, I sometimes use words which may have the likeness of humility and of spirituality, in my interior I do not understand them, I do not feel them. In truth it astonishes me that I speak at all, or use words so far removed from the truth and from that which I feel. I see clearly that man in this world deceives himself by admiring and esteeming things which are not, and neither sees nor esteems the things which are”

Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) Italian author and nurse

Source: Life and Doctrine, Ch. XIV

God, Truth, World, Feeling

“A little bit of rape is good for a man's soul.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Address on "Richard Milhous Nixon and Women's Liberation" at the University of California at Berkeley, as quoted in TIME magazine (6 November 1972) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,942598-2,00.html, which also reported that at the close of his address: : Mailer invited "all the feminists in the audience to please hiss." When a satisfying number obliged, he commented: "Obedient little bitches."

Soul

“I can't hold out any longer and am in a state of utter despair. After a few days of good weather, it's raining again and once again I have had to put the studies I started to one side. It's driving me to distraction and the unfortunate thing is that I take it out on my poor paintings. I destroyed a large picture of flowers which I'd just done along with three or four paintings which I not only scraped down but slashed. This is absurd... Please be kind enough to have some money forwarded to me.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in a letter from Pourville c. 1882, to his art-dealer Durand-Ruel; as cited in: K.E. Sullivan. Monet: Discovering Art, Brockhampton press, London (2004), p. 50
1870 - 1890

Money, Flowers, Study, Painting

“I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spend in doing good and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator, God.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

Last will (1809), as quoted in The Fortnightly Review https://books.google.com/books?id=PtlBAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA398&lpg=PA398&dq=%22Let+me+have+none+of+your+Popish+stuff%22&source=bl&ots=XKTgMyyfOF&sig=N-KTteQDfZyKQaQA0yyMGyHkBvU&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiBhM3xmcrLAhXonIMKHSBLCcoQ6AEIIjAD#v=onepage&q=%22Let%20me%20have%20none%20of%20your%20Popish%20stuff%22&f=false, Volume 31, pp. 398&ndash;399 1800s

Life, God, Time, Perfection

“They show as little Reason as Conscience who put the matter by with saying—"Men, in some cases, are lawfully made Slaves, and why may not these?" So men, in some cases, are lawfully put to death, deprived of their goods, without their consent; may any man, therefore, be treated so, without any conviction of desert? Nor is this plea mended by adding—"They are set forth to us as slaves, and we buy them without farther inquiry, let the sellers see to it." Such men may as well join with a known band of robbers, buy their ill-got goods, and help on the trade; ignorance is no more pleadable in one case than the other; the sellers plainly own how they obtain them. But none can lawfully buy without evidence that they are not concurring with Men-Stealers; and as the true owner has a right to reclaim his goods that were stolen, and sold; so the slave, who is proper owner of his freedom, has a right to reclaim it, however often sold.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

Death, Men, Freedom, Help

“I am a libertine, but I am not a criminal nor a murderer, and since I am compelled to set my apology alongside my vindication, I shall therefore say that it might well be possible that those who condemn me as unjustly as I have been might themselves be unable to offset the infamies by good works as clearly established as those I can contrast to my errors. I am a libertine, but three families residing in your area have for five years lived off my charity, and I have saved them from the farthest depths of poverty. I am a libertine, but I have saved a deserter from death, a deserter abandoned by his entire regiment and by his colonel. I am a libertine, but at Evry, with your whole family looking on, I saved a child—at the risk of my life—who was on the verge of being crushed beneath the wheels of a runaway horse-drawn cart, by snatching the child from beneath it. I am a libertine, but I have never compromised my wife’s health. Nor have I been guilty of the other kinds of libertinage so often fatal to children’s fortunes: have I ruined them by gambling or by other expenses that might have deprived them of, or even by one day foreshortened, their inheritance? Have I managed my own fortune badly, as long as I have had a say in the matter? In a word, did I in my youth herald a heart capable of the atrocities of which I today stand accused?… How therefore do you presume that, from so innocent a childhood and youth, I have suddenly arrived at the ultimate of premeditated horror? No, you do not believe it. And yet you who today tyrannize me so cruelly, you do not believe it either: your vengeance has beguiled your mind, you have proceeded blindly to tyrannize, but your heart knows mine, it judges it more fairly, and it knows full well it is innocent.”

Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French novelist and philosopher

This passage comes from a letter addressed to his wife. It was written during his imprisonment at the Bastille.
"L’Aigle, Mademoiselle…"

Life, Death, Children, Health

“A desire for children, I suppose; for Nessa's life; for the sense of flowers breaking all round me involuntarily. […] Years and years ago, after the Lytton affair, I said to myself, walking up the hill at Bayreuth, never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having; good advice I think. And then I went on to say to myself that one must like things for themselves; or rather, rid them of their bearing upon one's personal life. One must venture on to the things that exist independently of oneself. Now this is very hard for young women to do. Yet I got satisfaction from it. And now, married to L., I never have to make the effort. Perhaps I have been to happy for my soul's good? And does some of my discontent come from feeling that?”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

2 January 1923
A Moment's Liberty (1990)

Life, Women, Children, Feeling

“However much Rome may be in the habit of speaking and writing, for my own part, I shall give these libellers a lesson in good manners.”

Cesare Borgia (1475–1507) Duke of Romagna and former Catholic cardinal

Cesare to his father, Pope Alexander VI, (November, 1501), as quoted by Rafael Sabatini, 'The Life of Cesare Borgia', Chapter XI: The Letter to Silvio Savelli.

Parting

“All I did was cash in on the fact that I'm good-looking and I have a good figure and girls like me.”

Sid Vicious (1957–1979) English bassist and vocalist

Reported in Stephen Colegrave, Chris Sullivan, Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution (2005), p. 306.

Girl

“Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.”

Joseph Joubert (1754–1824) French moralist and essayist

“If I have any justification for having lived it's simply, I'm nothing but faults, failures and so on, but I have tried to make a good pair of shoes. There's some value in that.”

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) playwright from the United States

Marxism Today (January 1988)

Shoe, Failure

“I have an equal right to make poems as you have to pray, I have the same right to sing for my bread as you to beg for it. Are not hymns and sequences but other kinds of odes and elegiacs? And are not the psalms of David poems to the good God?”

Dafydd ap Gwilym (1320–1380) Welsh poet

Cyn rheitied i mi brydu
Ag i tithau bregethu,
A chyn iawned ym glera
Ag I tithau gardota.
Pand englynion ac odlau
Yw'r hymnau a'r segwensiau?
A chywyddau i Dduw lwyd
Yw sallwyr Dafydd Broffwyd.
"Y Bardd a'r Brawd Llwyd" (The Poet and the Grey Brother), line 53; translation from Dafydd ap Gwilym (trans. Nigel Heseltine) Twenty-Five Poems (Banbury: The Piers Press, 1968) p. 42.

God, Singing

“How much good it would do if one could exterminate the human race.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

A characteristic saying of Russell, reported by Aldous Huxley in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell dated 8 October 1917, as quoted in Bibliography of Bertrand Russell (Routledge, 2013)
1910s

“In every society, a few individuals acquire the status of an elite through talent. Due to superior achievements of wealth, wisdom, and bravery, these individuals come to possess natural authority, and their opinions and judgments enjoy wide-spread respect. Moreover, because of selective mating, marriage, and the laws of civil and genetic inheritance, positions of natural authority are likely to be passed on within a few noble families. It is to the heads of these families with long-established records of superior achievement, farsightedness, and exemplary personal conduct that men turn to with their conflicts and complaints against each other. These leaders of the natural elite act as judges and peacemakers, often free of charge out of a sense of duty expected of a person of authority or out of concern for civil justice as a privately produced "public good."”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe (1949) Austrian school economist and libertarian anarcho-capitalist philosopher

Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State http://www.mises.org/etexts/intellectuals.asp (21 July 2006)

Wisdom, Men, Marriage, Family

“The first duty towards children is to make them happy. If you have not made them so, you have wronged them. No other good they may get can make up for that.”

Charles Buxton (1823–1871) English brewer, philanthropist, writer and politician

Source: Notes of Thought (1883), p. 147

Children, Happiness

“Back around 1971, I was playing in a bar in Chicago one night, and after the show, I was packing up my guitar and stuff, and I was walking out the door, and a little guy stopped me. And he said, "Arlo, before you leave, I wanna sing you a song." I said "Come on man, I don't wanna hear no songs. I hate songs. I don't even like my songs! Why should I like your songs?" I was just tired, I wanted to get out of there, I was being a butt-head. He said, "Arlo, I just wanna sing you one song." I said, "Tell you what. Buy me beer. I'll sit here and drink it. As long as it lasts, you can do whatever you want." He said, "That sounds like a good deal."”

Arlo Guthrie (1947) American folk singer

I said "It does?" It turned out to be one of the finer beers of my entire life.
Arlo talking about his first meeting with Steve Goodman, who would perform to him "The City of New Orleans" (Live in Sydney)

Life, Hate, Guy, Drink

“There are two things that I want you to make up your minds to: first, that you are going to have a good time as long as you live – I have no use for the sour-faced man – and next, that you are going to do something worthwhile, that you are going to work hard and do the things you set out to do.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

Talk to schoolchildren in Oyster Bay, Christmastime (1898), as quoted in The Bully Pulpit : A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations (2002) by H. Paul Jeffers, p. 22
1890s

Time

“Marie falls back upon her idea, obdurately, and says, "A woman only lives by love and for love. When she's no longer good for that she's no longer anything."
She repeats, "You see — I'm nothing any more."
Ah, she is at the bottom of her abyss! She is at the extremity of a woman's mourning! She is not thinking only of me. Her thought is higher and vaster. She is thinking of all the woman she is, of all that love is, of all possible things when she says, "I'm no longer anything." And I — I am only he who is present with her just now, and no help whatever is left her to look for from any one.
I should like to pacify and console this woman who is gentleness and simplicity and who is sinking there while she lightly touches me with her presence — but exactly because she is there I cannot lie to her, I can do nothing against her grief, her perfect, infallible grief.
"Ah!" she cries, "if we came to life again!"”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIX - Ghosts

Love, Life, Lie, Idea

“And so you have to be practical in asking yourself how can you achieve the goals of equality and inclusion, but also recognize that the market system produces a lot of wealth and goods and services. And it also gives individuals freedom because they have initiative. And so you don't have to be rigid in saying it’s either this or that, you can say -- depending on the problem you're trying to solve, depending on the social issues that you're trying to address what works. And I think that what you’ll find is that the most successful societies, the most successful economies are ones that are rooted in a market-based system, but also recognize that a market does not work by itself. It has to have a social and moral and ethical and community basis, and there has to be inclusion. Otherwise it’s not stable. And it’s up to you -- whether you're in business or in academia or the nonprofit sector, whatever you're doing -- to create new forms that are adapted to the new conditions that we live in today.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2016, Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative Town Hall (March 2016)

Communication, Business, Problem, Thinking

“Once you give people the idea that all this can be done by the State, and that it is somehow second-best or even degrading to leave it to private people…then you will begin to deprive human beings of one of the essential ingredients of humanity—personal moral responsibility. You will in effect dry up in them the milk of human kindness. If you allow people to hand over to the State all their personal responsibility, the time will come—indeed it is close at hand—when what the taxpayer is willing to provide for the good of humanity will be seen to be far less than what the individual used to be willing to give from love of his neighbour. So do not be tempted to identify virtue with collectivism. I wonder whether the State services would have done as much for the man who fell among thieves as the Good Samaritan did for him? …the role of the State in Christian Society is to encourage virtue, not to usurp it.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at St Lawrence Jewry (30 March 1978) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/103522 Leader of the Opposition

Love, People, Idea, Time

“Fundamentally, however, there is neither good nor evil; this is all based on human concepts. In the universe there exists neither good nor evil, because everything has been created in accordance with immutable laws. the divine principles are reflected in these laws, and only through knowing these laws will we be able to get close to the divine.”

Franz Bardon book Initiation Into Hermetics

Source: Initiation Into Hermetics (1956), p. 27.

Law, Universe, Evil

“Good companies will meet needs; great companies will create markets.”

Philip Kotler (1931) American marketing author, consultant and professor

Philip Kotler, cited in: Stuart Crainer (2002), The 75 Greatest Management Decisions Ever Made, p. 37

“The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works.”

Aurelius Augustinus (354–430) early Christian theologian and philosopher

Tractates on the Gospel of John; tractate XII on John 3:6-21, § 13 https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701012.htm

Evil

“Equal interchange of goods and service between buyer and seller is the keynote of tomorrow’s business world when the vision of the modern business man awakens him to the wisdom of writing that policy into his code of ethics.”

Walter Russell (1871–1963) American philosopher

The Man who Tapped the Secrets of the Universe

Wisdom, World, Business

“Many will think they may reasonably blame me by alleging that my proofs are opposed to the authority of certain men held in the highest reverence by their inexperienced judgments; not considering that my works are the issue of pure and simple experience, who is the one true mistress. These rules are sufficient to enable you to know the true from the false — and this aids men to look only for things that are possible and with due moderation — and not to wrap yourself in ignorance, a thing which can have no good result, so that in despair you would give yourself up to melancholy.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), I Prolegomena and General Introduction to the Book on Painting

Men, Thinking, Falseness, Despair

“Note to self: It's a good idea to ask, 'What am I not doing?”

Ben Horowitz book The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers (2014)

Idea

“The moral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God manifested in the creation towards all his creatures. That seeing as we daily do the goodness of God to all men, it is an example calling upon all men to practise the same towards each other; and, consequently, that every thing of persecution and revenge between man and man, and every thing of cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral duty.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

Recapitulation
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)

Men, God, Revenge, Animals

“There is an idea of free will associated with it too. In order for there to be being, there has to be limitation. In order for there to be good, there has to be the possibility of evil. I think the right path is to exist such that the possibility of evil remains open, but that you choose the good. And I don't think that evil perse is built into the structure of the world. But I do think that it's human. I think that evil is human. And I think it's understandable. There is a difference between evil and tragedy. Tragedy does seem to be built into the structure of the world. But human beings seem to be equipped to deal with tragedy, but we are not equipped to deal with malevolence. That destroys people. I think that, metaphysically thinking, the world is structured such that humans have a choice between good and evil. Why do we have a choice? We don't know.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

People, World, Idea, Understanding

“Human Felicity is produc'd not so much by great Pieces of good Fortune that seldom happen, as by little Advantages that occur every Day.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

Part III, p. 108.
The Autobiography (1818)

“Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1910s, Political Ideals (1917)

Life

“The new readers have mentality, fashions, feelings completely different from those of previous readers. Should I draw comics following my first readers in their growth? Or should I stop doing the cartoonist? … More or less every three years a cartoonist for children is cornered. I, too, every three years, living a crisis. So I decide and I get back to work for my new readers as if they were the first. … This is why I am certain that the good work that will draw able to make happy readers of all time.”

Osamu Tezuka (1928–1989) Japanese cartoonist and animator

From My Diary manga , 1966; quoted in AA.VV., Osamu Tezuka: A Manga Biography , vol. 3, translated by Marta Fogato, Coconino Press, Bologna, 2001, p. 26. ISBN 8888063102

Children, Feeling, Fashion, Time

“There are regions beyond the most nebulous outskirts of matter; but no regions beyond the Divine goodness. We may conceive of tracts where there are no worlds, but not of any where there us no God of mercy.”

James Waddel Alexander (1804–1859) American Presbyterian minister and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 274.

God, World

“[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system... a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to C.L. Moore (c. mid-October 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 566
Non-Fiction, Letters

Truth, Education, Courage, Personality

“A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far." If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
Context: Right here let me make as vigorous a plea as I know how in favor of saying nothing that we do not mean, and of acting without hesitation up to whatever we say. A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb: "Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far." If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; and neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.

Lie

“People in general do not know what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt of it, and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book which they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing; it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

Source: 1790s, The Age of Reason, Part II (1795), Chapter I: The Old Testament.

God, People, Books, Idea

Quotes about goodness page 14

Quotes about goodness
page 14