“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.” — Francis Bacon

“Good can imagine Evil, but Evil cannot imagine Good.” — W.H. Auden

“Good men seek it by the natural means of the virtues; evil men, however, try to achieve the same goal by a variety of concupiscences, and that is surely an unnatural way of seeking the good. Don’t you agree?” — Boethius

“For never, never, wicked man was wise.” — Homer

“Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil.” — G.K. Chesterton

American artist Dennis Oppenheim denied that his 1997 Device to Root Out Evil, above, had an anti-religious message. “Pointing a steeple into the ground directs it to hell as opposed to heaven,” he told one interviewer. “It’s a very simple gesture.”

“It has been said of the Iliad that anyone who starts reading it as history will find that it is full of fiction but, equally, anyone who starts reading it as fiction will find that it is full of history.” — Arnold Toynbee

“Sweet is the remembrance of troubles when you are in safety.” — Euripides

“Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility.” — James Thurber

But:

“In every adversity of fortune, to have been happy is the most unhappy kind of misfortune.” — Boethius

“The light in the world comes principally from two sources, — the sun, and the student’s lamp.” — Christian Nestell Bovee, Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, 1862

“If I love you, what business is it of yours?” — Goethe

“Heresy is the side that loses.” — J.V. Fleming

“Patriotism ruins history.” — Goethe

I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

— Charles Darwin, letter to Asa Gray, May 22, 1860