A Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.

Thomas Aquinas

Quote Topics

Good Cannot Evil Exist Whereas Without

Quote Author

Thomas Aquinas
Italian - Theologian
1225 - 1274

They say there is no light without dark, no good without evil, no male without female, no right without wrong. That nothing can exist if it's direct opposite does not also exist.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Inside each of us, there is the seed of both good and evil. It's a constant struggle as to which one will win. And one cannot exist without the other.

Eric Burdon

It is due to neither impotence nor ignorance on God’s part that evils occur in the world, but it is owing to the order of his wisdom and to the greatness of his goodness, whence come the many and divers grades of goodness in things, many of which would be lacking were he to allow no evil to exist. Thus there would be no good of patience without the evil of persecution, nor the good of the preservation of its life in a lion, without the evil of the destruction of the animals on which it lives.

Thomas Aquinas

One may say that evil does not exist for subjective man at all, that there exist only different conceptions of good. Nobody ever does anything deliberately in the interests of evil, for the sake of evil. Everybody acts in the interests of good, as he understands it. But everybody understands it in a different way. Consequently men drown, slay, and kill one another in the interests of good.

G. I. Gurdjieff

Peace cannot exist without justice, justice cannot exist without fairness, fairness cannot exist without development, development cannot exist without democracy, democracy cannot exist without respect for the identity and worth of cultures and peoples.

Rigoberta Menchu

Good and evil are polar concepts - one can't exist without the other.

Bruno Dumont

Just as the day cannot exist without the night, just as life cannot exist without death, creativity cannot exist without silence. And vice versa is also true: silence cannot exist without creativity.

Rajneesh

When one has once accepted and absorbed Evil, it no longer demands the unfitness of the means. The ulterior motives with which youabsorb and assimilate Evil are not your own but those of Evil.... Evil is whatever distracts. Evil knows of the Good, but Good does not know of Evil. Knowledge of oneself is something only Evil has. One means that Evil has is the dialogue.... One cannot pay Evil in installments--and one always keeps on trying to.

Franz Kafka

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

Hannah Arendt

Since beings desire to exist, because to exist is a good thing: they desire the One without which they cannot exist.

Nicholas of Cusa

The distance between Evil and Good is a vast expanse in which many can exist without being either.

Amish Tripathi

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

T. S. Eliot

Our world cannot be complete without you, and without hearing what you have to say. True justice cannot exist without compassion; compassion cannot exist without understanding. But no one will understand you unless you speak, and are able to speak clearly (Sister Janet to the students, page 155).

Mark Salzman

It’s true that someone will always say that good and evil don’t exist: that is a person who has never had any dealings with real evil. Good is far less convincing than evil, but it’s because their chemical structures are different. Like gold, good is never found in a pure state in nature: it therefore doesn’t seem impressive. It has the unfortunate tendency not to act; it prefers, passively, to be seen.