Quotes about goodness
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“I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

“It starts when you begin to overlook good manners. Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight…”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

Source: No Country for Old Men

Time

“So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear, Farewell remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Fear, Hope, Evil

“Few people know how to take a walk. The qualifications are endurance, plain clothes, old shoes, an eye for nature, good humor, vast curiosity, good speech, good silence and nothing too much.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

People, Shoe, Nature, Silence

“Why d'ye talk to yourself?'
'It assures me of a good listener.”

Diana Gabaldon book A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Source: A Breath of Snow and Ashes

“Five minutes of a lifetime were truly spent, and we felt young in a good way.”

Stephen Chbosky (1970) American writer

Way

“Health food may be good for the conscience but Oreos taste a hell of a lot better.”

Robert Redford (1936) actor and film director from the United States

Health, Food, Hell

“The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.”

Gretchen Rubin (1966) American writer

Source: The Happiness Project: Or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

Truth, Feeling, Thinking, Happiness

“Any time your life is at stake and you can't find even one woman to come forward and say, 'This is a good man,' your problem isn't what kind of woman THEY are. Your problem is what kind of men YOU are.”

Pearl Cleage (1948) American novelist

Source: Just Wanna Testify

Life, Men, Problem, Time

“What’s the good of being true to your religion on the outside, if you don’t change what’s on the inside, were it really counts?”

Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979) contemporary Australian writer of novels for young adults

Source: Does My Head Look Big In This?

Religion, Change

“I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.”

Cormac McCarthy book No Country for Old Men

Source: No Country for Old Men (2005)
Context: I aint got all that many regrets. I could imagine lots of things that you might think would make a man happier. I think by the time you're grown you're as happy as you're goin to be. You'll have good times and bad times, but in the end you'll be about as happy as you was before. Or as unhappy. I've knowed people that just never did get the hang of it.

People, Thinking, Time, Happiness

“the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.”

Jasper Fforde book One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Source: One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

Books, World

“I dreamed of a green place once,” he whispered. “A manor house and a little girl with red hair, and preparations for a wedding. If there are other worlds, then maybe there is one where I was a good brother and a good son.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

World, Dreams, Girl, Wedding

“We're lost, but we're making good time.”

Yogi Berra (1925–2015) American baseball player, manager, coach

Time

“Good Lord, woman. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that men have a specified word count set aside each day and if I don’t stop talking, my tongue will explode? (Syn)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Fire

Men

“Our worst days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace.”

Jerry Bridges (1929–2016) American writer

Source: The Discipline of Grace: God's Role and Our Role in the Pursuit of Holiness

God

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People, Health, Books, World

“A nation which thinks that it is belief in God and not good law which makes people honest does not seem to me very advanced.”

Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist

God, People, Law, Thinking

“What is the greater good but tyranny’s chameleon?”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Faefever

“Change is good but dollars are better.
- Tara daniels”

Jill Shalvis (1963) American writer

Source: The Sweetest Thing

Change

“There's good self-consciousness, and then there's toxic, paralyzing, raped-by-psychic-Bedouins self-consciousness.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

“We used to build temples, and museums are about as close as secular society dares to go in facing up to the idea that a good building can change your life (and a bad one ruin it).”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Life, Idea, Change

“Money is like muck, not good except it be spread.”

Francis Bacon book Essays

Of Seditions and Troubles
Essays (1625)
Source: The Essays

Money

“Evil happens without effort, naturally, inevitably; good is always the product of skill.”

Charles Baudelaire Le Peintre de la vie moderne

Le mal se fait sans effort, naturellement, par fatalité; le bien est toujours le produit d'un art. XI: "Éloge du maquillage" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/%C3%89loge_du_maquillage Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863)

Nature, Effort, Evil

“It's not bad enough I am exiled? It's not bad enough you take away the few good heroes I'm allowed to meet? You think it's funny to send me this this ― this charbroiled runt of a boy to ruin my tranquility? This is NOT FUNNY! Take him back!”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Boy, Thinking

“But I have told the truth. Isn't that ironic? They sent me because I am so good at telling lies. But I have told the truth.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Truth

“. “Love doesn’t please itself by seeking revenge. Love sacrifices itself for the good of others.”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: Be Still My Vampire Heart

Love, Revenge

“People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don't know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Interview With The Vampire (1976)
Source: Interview with the Vampire

God, People, Evil

“If I'm good enough to bed, surely I'm good enough to wed.”

Elizabeth Hoyt (1970) American writer

Source: Notorious Pleasures

Wedding

“… but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it…”

Frank O'Hara book Lunch Poems

Source: Lunch Poems

Decision, Night, Dead

“I am miracle ingredient Z-247. I'm immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide supraman.”

Joseph Heller book Catch-22

Source: Catch 22

“Doesn't our knowledge of death make life more precious?'

What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety? It's an anxious quivering thing”

Don DeLillo book White Noise

Source: White Noise

Life, Death, Fear, Knowledge

“I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.”

Raymond Chandler book The High Window

Source: The High Window (1942), chapter 36
Context: When I left, Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie-crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homely smile on her face to watch me drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

Feeling, Housing

“You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?"I said. To myself.”

Jennifer Donnelly A Northern Light

Source: A Northern Light

Books, Time, Reading

“She smiled. “Life is full of stories. Or maybe life is only stories. Good night, my dear Nao.”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Life, Smile, Night

“He had never felt entirely comfortable around Raphael. Raphael seemed to him like Loki or some other trickster God, sometimes working for good and sometimes for evil, but always in his own interests.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Heavenly Fire

Source: City of Heavenly Fire

God, Evil

“… It is the Law that while Evil, unopposed, may accomplish terrible deeds, the power of Good can never be overthrown when opposed to Evil…”

L. Frank Baum book The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

Source: The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus

Law, Evil

“one of the good things about being a woman is that my level of testosterone poisoning is lower than most men's.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Obsidian Butterfly

Source: Obsidian Butterfly

Men

“He broke the kiss and leaned against her, breathing hard. "Good morning to you, too. Man, I just can't stay mad when you do that.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Midnight Alley

Kiss, Madness

“It would ha' been a good deal easier, if ye'd only been a witch.”

Diana Gabaldon (1952) American author

Variant: Aye, I believe ye, Sassenach. But it would ha’ been a good deal easier if you’d only been a witch.
Source: The Exile: An Outlander Graphic Novel

“What's the point in wasting a perfectly good brick wall when you have someone to throw against it, that's what I always say.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Fallen Angels

Source: City of Fallen Angels

“My own great-grandfather, who said simply enough, "No wicked man could write such a book as this; and no good man would write it unless it were true and he were commanded of God to do so.”

Jeffrey R. Holland (1940) Mormon leader

God, Books

“anger cancels good judgement!”

Sister Souljah (1964) American hip hop-generation author, activist, recording artist, and film producer

Source: Midnight

Anger

“I wondered if Olympus had gone to a commercial break, or if our ratings had been any good.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“Everybody deserves to have something good in their life. At least once”

Morris Gleitzman book Once

Source: Once

Life

“Nick glowered at Ash. "Are we through now, Dad? Can I go play with my friends if I promise to be a good boy? I'll even try and make it home by curfew."

Ash laughed evilly. "Oh, absolutely, son. In fact, here come your new playmates now.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Dream Warrior

Home, Boy

“People who can be very good can be very bad too.”

Agatha Christie book They Do It with Mirrors

Source: They Do It with Mirrors

People

“God, of your goodness, give me yourself; you are enough for me, and anything less that I could ask for would not do you full honor. And if I ask anything that is less, I shall always lack something, but in you alone I have everything'.”

Julian of Norwich book Revelations of Divine Love

Source: Revelations of Divine Love

God

“I know it is wet and the sun is not sunny, but we can have lots of good fun that is funny.”

Dr. Seuss book The Cat in the Hat

Source: The Cat in the Hat

Sun

“He gets hurt by the smallest touch. It'll be okay, as long as there will finally be a day. Eventually, one day. It will be good if all our burdens would finally be released. I really hope you can do it. I hope you two can both live happily.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Hope, Hurt

“I loved him, you know, but I have a theory about love. I think that, however good it is, some love isn't meant to be for ever.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: How to Fall in Love

Love, Thinking

“The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions”

Daniel Webster (1782–1852) Leading American senator and statesman. January 18, 1782 – October 24, 1852. Served as the Secretary of Sta…

People

“I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.”

William Faulkner book Light in August

Source: Light in August

Fools

“one of the sisters started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.”

Eva Ibbotson (1925–2010) British children's writer

Source: Island of the Aunts

Sister

“I do not believe you can threaten people into goodness.” - Jem Carstairs”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Variant: I do not believe you can threaten people into goodness.
Source: Clockwork Angel

People

“Simon sighed. "People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but It's the way you live your life that matters.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Variant: People aren't born good or bad. Maybe they're born with tendencies either way, but its the way you live your life that matters.
Source: City of Glass

Life, People, Way

“If you don't annoy your big sister for no good reason from time to time, she thinks you don't love her anymore.”

Pearl Cleage What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Source: What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day

Love, Thinking, Sister, Time

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

World

“Consideration for others is the basis of a good life, a good society.”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

Life

“The key to happiness - as any good fairy godmother will tell you - is not to avoid problems, but to overcome them.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Unfair Godmother

Problem, Happiness

“Myrna could spend happy hours browsing bookcases. She felt if she could just get a good look at a person’s bookcase and their grocery cart, she’d pretty much know who they were.”

Louise Penny book Still Life

Source: Still Life

Personality, Happiness

“That's the thing about the internet. It's really good at giving you pointless facts like how many horses a star owns, but not important things like how to invade his trailer.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: Just One Wish

Star, Horse

“In the end what matters is not how good we are but how good God is. Not how much we love Him but how much He loves us. And God loves us whoever we are, whatever we’ve done or failed to do, whatever we believe or can’t.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Love, God

“But there are people who'll try to hurt you through the good they see in you--knowing that it's the good, needing it and punishing you for it. Don't let it break you when you discover that.”

Ayn Rand book Atlas Shrugged

Source: Atlas Shrugged

People, Hurt

“Why is it the songs all end with the good people winning, but in life they don't?"
They don't make songs when the good lose," I muttered. "They make war chants against the bad. So there won't be any songs for us.”

Sherwood Smith book Crown Duel

Source: Crown Duel

Life, War, People

“The thing about lying to your parents is, you have to do it to protect them.
It’s for their own good.”

Sophie Kinsella book Twenties Girl

Source: Twenties Girl

For Parents, Lying, Parent

“Life is like sex. It’s not always good, but its always worth trying.”

Pamela Anderson (1967) Canadian-American model, producer, author, former showgirl

Life, Sex

“I haven't stopped looking for the good in people. I've just accepted the fact that I'm not always going to find it.”

Patti LaBelle (1944) American singer-songwriter and actress

People

“Horton, the kangaroo has sent Vlad!'
Vlad? I know two Vlads. One is a cute little bunny that brings me cookies. The other is bad Vlad. Which Vlad?'
Which one do you think?'
Bad Vlad?'
Good call.”

Dr. Seuss Horton Hears a Who!

Source: Horton Hears a Who!

Thinking

“There is no such thing as a good writer and a bad liar.”

Amy Bloom (1953) Fiction writer, screenwriter, social worker, psychotherapist

Source: A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You

“A 'good job' can be both practically attractive while still not good enough to devote your entire life to.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Life

“Faith is only as good as the one in whom it's invested.”

Lee Strobel (1952) American writer

Source: The Case for the Real Jesus: A Journalist Investigates Current Attacks on the Identity of Christ

Faith

“Nice is different than good.”

Stephen Sondheim (1930) American composer and lyricist

“Personally, I wish D. would come after me, I need a good dance partner. My Daimons have lame legs. (Acheron)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon book Night Pleasures

Source: Night Pleasures

Dance, Personality

“Just because it makes no sense doesn't mean it's not good advice.”

Mick Farren (1943–2013) English journalist, author and singer

Sense

“Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, Letter from a Birmingham Jail (1963)
Context: I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

People, Understanding

“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.”

Ernest Hemingway book A Moveable Feast

Source: A Moveable Feast

“She shrugged. "You can be happy for someone else's good fortune, but that doesn't mean you forget your own bad luck.”

Jodi Picoult Plain Truth

Source: Plain Truth

Bad luck, Forgetting, Happiness

“He who waits to do a great deal of good at once will never do anything.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Waiting

“As for myself, I always willingly acknowledge my own self as the principal cause of every good and of every evil which may befall me; therefore I have always found myself capable of being my own pupil, and ready to love my teacher.”

Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) Italian adventurer and author from the Republic of Venice

Memoirs (trans. Machen 1894), book 1, Preface http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/c/casanova/c33m/preface2.html Referenced Source: Geschichte Meines Lebens

Love, Teachers, Evil

“She deserved at least one person who saw her and knew how good she was.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Personality