"It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions." - Aristotle


"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." - Marcus Aurelius


"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." - Mikhail Bakunin


"Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company of other men, attended by love." - Saul Bellow


"No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand." - Bertolt Brecht


"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." - Emily Bronte


"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." - Phillips Brooks


"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!" - Elizabeth Barrett Browning


"As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn't know the bad he might do." - Elias Canetti


"Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die." - Thomas Carlyle


"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." - Pablo Casals


"Good and bad men are less than they seem." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge


"It is very hard to be simple enough to be good." - Ralph Waldo Emerson


"In goodness there are all kinds of wisdom." - Euripides


"The devil himself is good when he is pleased." - Thomas Fuller


"The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration." - Jose Ortega Y Gasset


"Goodness is uneventful. It does not flash, it glows." - David Grayson


"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." - William Hazlitt


"Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature." - Georg Hegel


"Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced." - Aldous Huxley


"To make one good action succeed another, is the perfection of goodness." - Ali Ibn-Abi-Talib


"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." - Alice James


"True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power." - Milan Kundera


"There are few good women who do not tire of their role." - Francois De La Rochefoucauld


"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." - Mary Mccarthy


"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end." - Iris Murdoch


"What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man." - Friedrich Nietzsche


"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time." - George Orwell


"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." - Chinese Proverb


"Goodness speaks in a whisper, evil shouts" - Tibetan Proverb


"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." - Ernest Renan


"Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is." - Jean Jacques Rousseau


"The measure of your holiness is proportionate to the goodness of your will." - Jan Van Ruysbroeck


"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." - Johann Friedrich Von Schiller


"How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good dead in a naughty world." - William Shakespeare


"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." - Percy Bysshe Shelley


"Goodness is the only investment which never fails." - Henry David Thoreau


"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." - Source Unknown


"Look for no reward in goodness but goodness itself." - Source Unknown


"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" - Simone Weil


"One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good." - H.G. Wells


"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." - Oscar Wilde


"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." - Oscar Wilde