The Good Quotes

“Good-bye -- if you hear of my being stood up against a stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease or falling down the cellar stairs.”
― Ambrose Bierce

“Darker and darker, he said; farther and farther yet. Death takes the good, the beautiful, and the young - and spares me. The Pestilence that wastes, the Arrow that strikes, the Sea that drowns, the Grave the closes over Love and Hope, are steps of my journey, and take me nearer and nearer to the End.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

“The good is twice described in
the Philebus as perfect, self-
sufficient and seeked by all
conscious beings. And the good
does not have a contrary: it is not
the one end of a scale whose evil
would be the other end; it is a
measure on any scale."

Taken from Bernard Suzanne
Plato and his dialogues
Pursuing Goodness or the Good.
Updated Nov 21, 1998”
― Plato

“Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.”
― Aristotle

“Every man who begets a free act projects his personality into the infinite. If he gives a poor man a penny grudgingly, that penny pierces the poor man’s hand, falls, pierces the earth, bores holes in suns, crosses the firmament and compromises the universe. If he begets an impure act, he perhaps darkens thousands of hearts whom he does not know, who are mysteriously linked to him, and who need this man to be pure as a traveler dying of thirst needs the Gospel’s draught of water. A charitable act, an impulse of real pity sings for him the divine praises, from the time of Adam to the end of the ages; it cures the sick, consoles those in despair, calms storms, ransoms prisoners, converts the infidel and protects mankind”
― Léon Bloy, Pilgrim of the Absolute

“I could wish to spy the nakedness of their hearts, and through the different disguises of customs, climates, and religion, find out what is good in them, to fashion my own by. It is for this reason that I have not seen the Palais Royal - nor the facade of the Louvre - nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches - I conceive every fair being as a temple, and would rather enter in, and see the original drawings and loose sketches hung up in it, than the Transfiguration of Raphael itself.”
― Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“The reward of the good man is to be allowed to worship in truth.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“No, like worldly contempt, worldly honor is a whirlpool, a play of confused forces, an illusory moment in the flux of opinions. It is a sense-deception, as when a swarm of insects at a distance seem to the eye like one body; a sense-deception, as when the noise of the many at a distance seems to the ear like a single voice.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high - spirited, "Well, now you're just like the rest of us," meaning, among other things to be reassuring. But I compare myself with my former self, not with the others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been mildly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.

And I miss Saturn very much." An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison page 92, paragraph 1 sentence 2 -4 and paragraph 2”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Hey I'm sorry about the other day. Didn't mean to give you a hard time, I ---"

He held up his hands. "It's no problem. And I didn't mean to be pushy. But i've seen a lot of people let the bad around them make them hard or stubborn. In the end, they miss the chance to make their world bette because they only see the worst in it."

There was still something about the tone of his voice and his features that made me feel like I knew him.

"I know what you mean." I shook my head. "I don't want to be like that. But I get so angry. Sometimes I feel like I know too much, or that I've done things I can't make right, and it just hovers over me. And when I see things happen that shouldn't..."

"You don't know what to do with yourself."

"Exactly."

He nodded. "Well, I'd start by thinking about what's good. Then I'd ask myself how I could make that good even better."

I laughed. "That doesn't make sense."

He stood. "You just think about it a little.”
― Kiera Cass, The Selection Stories: The Prince & The Guard

“...the good never suspect others of perpetrating wicked deeds which they themselves are incapable of committing. That is why they are so easily duped by the first rogue who sinks his claws into them, and why it is so easy and so despicable to trick them.”
― Marquis de Sade, The Crimes of Love

“For as the Good is only a single thing, so all ways lead to the Good, even the false ones: when the repentant one follows the same way back.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession

“The bad self is prepared to suffer but not to obey until the two selves are friends and obedience has become reasonably easy or at least amusing. In reality the good self is very small indeed, and most of what appears good is not. The truly good is not a friendly tyrant to the bad, it is its deadly foe. Even suffering can play a demonic role here, and the ideas of guilt and punishment can be the most subtle tool of the ingenious self. The idea of suffering confuses the mind and in certain contexts (the context of ‘sincere self-examination’ for instance) can masquerade as a purification.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good

“And just when it seemed the storm would never pass there was the sun and all was good again.”
― Wald Wassermann

“To know the good is a dangerous thing; to know it for sure is usually fatal for somebody.”
― Allen Wheelis, Moralist

“God has said for us to know bad, as bad and good, as good. But while knowing the bad, there should not be the slightest abhorrence towards it and while knowing the good, there should not be slightest attachment towards it. Without knowing bad, as bad, the good cannot be known as good.”
― Dada Bhagwan

“As no designation of good and evil can be absolute, neither can it be fixed; no law which is just now will be forever just, and no political institution designed to secure the good can remain the best means to that good.”
― Allen Wheelis

“With deft dialectical (and literary) skill Plato, whenever necessary, abstracts and rarifies mortal beauty into a matter of proportion, suitability, and truth until it becomes “that other beauty,” which conveniently resembles the nature of the good, which is also these things. But in the process of abstraction—in trying to find the face of beauty beyond the world of experience—what is lost is exactly that which makes the beautiful so. Indeed, whenever we chance to glimpse at beauty in the course of life, it never appears with a plaintiff or veil, but always in an easy grandeur.”
― Michael Shindler

“Evil can die. Let the good live.”
― Adrienne Posey

“We find total peace when we accept that, due to our karma, we deserve the good and the bad that is happening in our lives.”
― Mitta Xinindlu