Quotes Tagged "good"

Men who give up the common goal of all things that exist, thereby cease to exist themselves. Some may perhaps think it strange that we say that wicked men, who form the majority of men, do not exist; but that is how it is. I am not trying to deny the wickedness of the wicked; what I do deny is that their existence is absolute and complete existence. Just as you might call a corpse a dead man, but couldn't simply call it a man, so I would agree that the wicked are wicked, but could not agree that they have unqualified existence.

It is our deepest hurts which have the power to help and heal us. What else carries an internal fire big enough to force us forwards? What else has the momentum to wake us up? What else has enough pain to make us long for something better? What else will drive us into the waiting arms of that beautiful, invisible life-force which yearns to help us? What else will teach us to feel the love which has no betrayal; the love which seeks only good?

Happiness is the manifestation of confronting only good.

Tell me there is still good in the world. Tell me there is still hope for all of us.

He hesitated, remembering something Finnikin had said to him on their journey. That somehow, even in the worst of times, the tiniest fragments of good survive. It was the grip in which one held those fragments that counted.

After you hear and listen. First must come desire. Second must come willingness. Third should come understanding. Fourth should come progression and with progression will come more understanding.

When I touched that boy, I felt something. Something awful. Something I can’t describe.” “We all felt it,” Nick said. “You may have felt it, but I caused it.” Then both his eyes seemed to go far away. “Something changed out there. I don’t know what it was, but something in the world changed because that kid didn’t deserve what I did to him—and the powers that be know that I did it.” Nick watched as a tear fell from his Everlost eye and disappeared through the living world table. “What if,” said Nick, not even sure what he was going to say yet, “what if you were that kid and you were told you could change the world, but you would have to sacrifice yourself to do it?” Clarence chuckled at the thought. “I believe that question was already asked a long time ago, and that creepy kid did not look anything like Jesus to me.” “But you do think that something changed. . . .” “I don’t know whether it’s good or bad.” “What if it’s neither?” suggested Nick. “What if we get to make it one or the other?

There’s plenty of things that are wrong in our world, and we can give them free reign to completely define our view of the world. Or we can focus on the fact that what’s wrong with the world are the essential raw materials from which a person of determination crafts everything which is right.

In all things God's ways are good.

Does that mean that all one has to do is wait for the right moment? It was not just a question of that, as Hesse explained: the vita active and the vita contemplativa stand in a very sensitive relation to one another, which must constantly be rebalanced. He would come to summarize this in 1956: 'The flaw in our questioning and complaining is presumably this: namely, that we desire to have something given to us from outside that we can only attain within ourselves, through our own dedication. We demand that life must have a meaning - yet it has precisely as much meaning as we are able to impart to it.' This led him on to formulate the idea of a elite, a secret society, the invisible realm of the league of those taking part in The Journey to the East and finally to The Glass Bead Game - the 'monastery for free spirits' that Nietzsche had in mind and that Hesse affirmed and rejected in equal measure: 'In short, wanting to improve humanity is always a hopeless task. That is why I have always built my faith on the individual, for the individual can be educated and is capable of improvement, and according to my faith it has always been and still remains the small elite of well-intentioned, dedicated, and courageous people who are the guardians of all that is good and beautiful in the world.

I welcome injustice, because injustice gives me something to strive for. We need the darkness, for it allows the light to shine. God’s greatest gift to mankind is Satan, because evil gives us something to strive against.

Godly wisdom guide's a man to walk on the good path.

Evil's something you can decide to do every day, and it gets easier every time. But the more good you bring into the world, maybe the more the rest of the world would look like this. Like paradise.

If merely 'feeling good' could decide, drunkenness would be the supremely valid human experience.

My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

All things workers well for your good.

Having the eyes of a child does not mean that we are naïve. Rather, it means that we’ve become brave enough to believe in a great good while simultaneously embracing the reality of a great evil.

I will become discouraged and often I deeply lament of the fallenness that presses down in ever-darkening swells all around me. But I have learned that to be discouraged in the face of sin running rampant is simply my humanity finding itself vexed to exhaustion as I grapple with the wonder of ‘what could be’ as held against the depravity of ‘what is.’ Yet what I’ve learned is that discouragement is fortitude in the making, for God knows that to seize the vision of how good things can be we must first experience the wretchedness of how bad they can become. Only then will we understand the gravity of our mission and the power of goodness to achieve it.

If the candles that I am lighting are those that I have so cleverly crafted, a thousand of them or more amassed together cannot dispel the darkness from which I am forever seeking refuge. Yet, a solitary candle fashioned by God leaves the entire world a place where even the slightest of shadows has no refuge, and my candles no purpose.

At what point will I look beyond the rank pessimism of my own attitude and step beyond the jaded opinions of a culture gone sour in order to see that the opportunity for good will always outweigh the schemes of evil?