A Quote by C. S. Lewis
Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
Related Quotes
You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.
Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
All the goodness of a good egg cannot make up for the badness of a bad one.
Goodness has no opposite. Most of us consider goodness as the opposite of the bad or evil and so throughout history in any culture goodness has been considered the other face of that which is brutal. So man has always struggled against evil in order to be good; but goodness can never come into being if there is any form of violence or struggle.
The worst form of badness is human goodness when human goodness becomes a substitute for the new birth.
Hell means torture; torture means badness. Goodness cannot create or produce badness. Hell does not belong to God; it has been invented by the horrific and sick minded people.
Evil is thus a kind of parasite on goodness. If there were no good by which to measure things, evil could not exist. Men sometimes forget this, and say, there is so much evil in the world that there cannot be a God. They are forgetting that, if there were no God, they would have no way of distinguishing evil from goodness. The very concept of evil admits and recognizes a Standard, a Whole, a Rule, an Order. Nobody would say that his automobile was out of order if he did not have a conception of how an automobile ought to run.
Error is multiform (for evil is a form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of the limited), whereas success is possible in one way only (which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed - easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it); so this is another reason why excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue: Goodness is simple, badness is manifold.
as I get older there is nothing more constantly astonishing to me than the goodness of the Bad; - unless it is the badness of the Good.
It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.
... we condone the most bitter and vindictive intolerance from a desire to appear tolerant, and run to prove that badness is not as bad as it seems, by pointing out that goodness is not so good as it looks.
Goodness transcends badness.
But goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.
The only good thing we can do, the only goodness we can be sure of, is our own goodness as individuals and the good that we can individually do. As groups we often do evil that good may come and very often the good does not come and all that is left is the evil we have pointlessly done.
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