It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.
Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love.
No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.
A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.
No man or woman can be strong, gentle, pure, and good, without the world being better for it and without someone being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.
We all have known good critics, who have stamped out poet's hopes; Good statesmen, who pulled ruin on the state; Good patriots, who, for a theory, risked a cause; Good kings, who disemboweled for a tax; Good Popes, who brought all good to jeopardy; Good Christians, who sat still in easy-chairs; And damned the general world for standing up. Now, may the good God pardon all good men!
As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do.
Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.
Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it.
Good and bad men are less than they seem.
It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.
In goodness there are all kinds of wisdom.
The devil himself is good when he is pleased.
The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.
Goodness is uneventful. It does not flash, it glows.
If goodness were only a theory, it were a pity it should be lost to the world. There are a number of things, the idea of which is a clear gain to the mind. Let people, for instance, rail at friendship, genius, freedom, as long as they will --the very names of these despised qualities are better than anything else that could be substituted for them, and embalm even the most envenomed satire against them.
Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.
Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.
To make one good action succeed another, is the perfection of goodness.
How sick one gets of being good, how much I should respect myself if I could burst out and make everyone wretched for twenty-four hours; embody selfishness.
True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.
There are few good women who do not tire of their role.
The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.
Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end.
What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful --in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason --and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.
— Plato
There are two perfectly good men, one dead, and the other unborn.
Goodness speaks in a whisper, evil shouts
To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.
Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.
The measure of your holiness is proportionate to the goodness of your will.
Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen; goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.
— Sappho
Nothing leads to good that is not natural.
How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good dead in a naughty world.
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
Goodness is the only investment which never fails.
Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God.
Look for no reward in goodness but goodness itself.
At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done
One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn't. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.
To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.