Showing posts with label good. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good. Show all posts

Saturday, March 23, 2024

There's a line between good and evil no wider than a razor's edge. I hold the line. I am the line.

 

Spoken by "DS Hathaway" and another character in Lewis

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

A man -- a viewing-point man -- while he will love the abstract good qualities and detest the abstract bad, will nevertheless envy and admire the person who through possessing the bad qualities has succeeded economically and socially, and will hold in contempt that person whose good qualities have caused failure. When such a viewing-point man thinks of Jesus or St. Augustine or Socrates he regards them with love because they are the symbols of the good he admires, and he hates the symbols of the bad. But actually he would rather be successful than good. In an animal other than man we would replace the term "good" with "weak survival quotient" and the term "bad" with "strong survival quotient." Thus, man in his thinking or reverie status admires the progression toward extinction, but in the unthinking stimulus which really activates him he tends toward survival. Perhaps no other animal is so torn between alternatives. Man might be described fairly adequately, if simply, as a two-legged paradox. He has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of consciousness: Perhaps, as has been suggested, his species is not set, has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness.

 John SteinbeckThe Log from the Sea of Cortez

Monday, June 13, 2022

To know good by knowing good is the privilege of the unfallen.

Catherine Nicholson, on Milton in the NYR 

 

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

A good man knows when to sacrifice himself.... A bad man survives but loses his soul.

John LeCarre, The Mission Song