The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

Adam knew Eve his wife and she conceived. It is a pity that this is still the only knowledge of their wives at which some men seem to arrive.

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct; but to find these reasons is no less an instinct.

It is good to know what a man is, and also what the world takes him for. But you do not understand him until you have learnt how he understands himself.

The one self-knowledge worth having is to know one's own mind.

The force of the blow depends on the resistance. It is sometimes better not to struggle against temptation. Either fly or yield at once.

There are persons who, when they cease to shock us, cease to interest us.

Our live experiences, fixed in aphorisms, stiffen into cold epigrams. Our heart's blood, as we write it, turns to mere dull ink.

One said of suicide, As long as one has brains one should not blow them out. And another answered, But when one has ceased to have them, too often one cannot.

Eclecticism - every truth is so true that any truth must be false.

The world is the best of all possible worlds, and everything in it is a necessary evil.

It is by a wise economy of nature that those who suffer without change, and whom no one can help, become uninteresting. Yet so it may happen that those who need sympathy the most often attract it the least.

Another occupation might have been better.

There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth.

The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.

The secret of happiness is to admire without desiring. And that is not happiness.

The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.

The man who has ceased to fear has ceased to care.

True penitence condemns to silence. What a man is ready to recall he would be willing to repeat.

We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

The hunter for aphorisms on human nature has to fish in muddy water, and he is even condemned to find much of his own mind.

Boldness and decision command, often even in evil, the respect and concurrence of mankind.

For those whose wit becomes the mother of villainy, those it educates to be evil in all things.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

Destroy the seed of evil, or it will grow up to your ruin.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Into every soul, however purged and fenced, evil appears to have as much freedom of entrance as God Himself.

What I have learned from my work up to now, is to try to be open, but also protect myself by not letting the good and the evil get too much importance.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

One who is injured ought not to return the injury, for on no account can it be right to do an injustice; and it is not right to return an injury, or to do evil to any man, however much we have suffered from him.

The 20th century taught us how far unbridled evil can and will go when the world fails to confront it. It is time that we heed the lessons of the 20th century and stand up to these murderers. It is time that we end genocide in the 21st century.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

A great book is like great evil.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.

Be assured those will be thy worst enemies, not to whom thou hast done evil, but who have done evil to thee. And those will be thy best friends, not to whom thou hast done good, but who have done good to thee.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil.

Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear its fruit.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Every Christian will allow that sin is an evil, and that it is our duty not to commit sin.

But other vampire stories? Well, no, I really haven't read too many, and I can't say I'm crazy about romantic vampires anyway - to me the vampire is simply an evil monster.

We all agree that we've got to bring these terrorists to justice and to make sure that they're never allowed to perpetrate such an evil act as they did. And so all of us are dealing with that. We know that the President has the authority to go to war under the War Powers Act.

A resolution to avoid an evil is seldom framed till the evil is so far advanced as to make avoidance impossible.

Idleness among children, as among men, is the root of all evil, and leads to no other evil more certain than ill temper.

Example moves the world more than doctrine. The great exemplars are the poets of action, and it makes little difference whether they be forces for good or forces for evil.

However things may seem, no evil thing is success and no good thing is failure.

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

No evil is honorable: but death is honorable; therefore death is not evil.