Quotes & Sayings About Badness

Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. — C.S. Lewis

Whom do you call bad?
Those who always want to induce shame. — Friedrich Nietzsche

The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it. — Dave Barry

We can never lose what is really ours. Who can lose his being? Who can lose his very existence? If I am good, it is the existence first, and then that becomes colored with the quality of goodness. If I am evil, it is the existence first, and that becomes colored with the quality of badness. That existence is first, last, and always; it is never lost but ever present. — Swami Vivekananda

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. — Aristotle.

Faithfulness is not holding the fort. It's storming the gates of hell and taking back enemy territory that belongs to God.

I'm afraid we've reduced righteousness to the absence of wrongness, but goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Remember the parable of the bags of gold? Breaking even is bad. You've got to ante up everything. — Mark Batterson

You can tell when you have crossed the frontier into Germany because of the badness of the coffee. — Edward VII

Compromise, eh? Isn't it sad, growing up? You start off like Charlie. You start off thinking you can kill all the baddies and save the world. Then you get a little bit older, maybe Little Bee's age, and you realize that some of the world's badness is inside you, that maybe you're a part of it. And then you get a little bit older still, and a bit more comfortable, and you start wondering whether that badness you've seen in yourself is really all that bad at all. You start talking about ten percent. — Chris Cleave

As an actor you're only supposed to be a lover. I am a romantic hero though I don't like that tag. With all the hardships, problems, illness, goodness, badness, awards and money ... an actor will always be a lover. And a lover makes mistakes. You'll be silly, nonsensical and stupid. — Shahrukh Khan

The gospel enables you and your children to face the worst in yourselves - your sin, your badness, and your weakness - and still find hope, because grace is powerful. — Tedd Tripp

Where does guilt and punishment lie, and are we not more expressive over remorse or guilt when other people see the badness in us? — Joel Edgerton

You must know that with a good heart you can never be a poor person! And you must also know that with a bad heart it is impossible to be a rich person! Goodness enriches; badness impoverishes! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Finding hate-objects may be every bit as essential as finding love-objects, but if one can tolerate some of one's badness
meaning recognize it as yours
then one can take some fear out of the world. — Adam Phillips

It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible. — Marcus Aurelius

The great epochs of our life are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Support what is good and spit out what is bad. Get off of your knees and reject the role of slave to the culture of violence. — Bryant McGill

Nothing in the world is as hopeful as knowing a woman you like is somewhere thinking about only you. Conversely, there is no badness anywhere as acute as the badness of no woman out in the world thinking about you. Or worse. That one has quit because of some bone-headedness on your part. It is like looking out an airplane window and finding the earth has disappeared. No loneliness can compete with that. — Richard Ford

Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a dismal effect upon the soul.It exemplifies the badness of established, artificial authority. The pedagogue has almost absolute authority over pupils: he often beats them and insensibly he loses the sense of respect due to them as fellow human beings.He does them harm, but the harm they do him is far greater. He may easily become the all-knowing tyrant, always right, always virtuous; in any event he perpetually associates with his inferiors, the king of his company; and in a surprising short time alas this brands him with the mark of Cain. Have you ever known a schoolmaster fit to associate with grown men? — Patrick O'Brian

It is possible that the contemplation of cruelty will not make us humane but cruel; that the reiteration of the badness of our spiritual condition will make us consent to it. — Lionel Trilling

Given that most movies are bad, and that there are whole categories and sub-categories of badness - the sequel, the Madonna Movie, the Friday 13th Series, or Movies Starring John Travolta Before Pulp Fiction - it is almost impossible to choose a single film for worst movie of all time. But strangely, I do have a nomination and I believe it is actually the worst movie ever made. It is Boxing Helena. The director is David Lynch's daughter, and the film comes with the almost insane-making faults that the family connection might imply. — Andrew O'Hagan

We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness? — Nick Hornby

If it weren't for the Chicagos and Detroits and Toledos, the terrible things would spread out across the whole country and make trouble for everybody else. Such places were collectors of badness in the way hospitals were collectors of the sick and damaged. — Stephen Dobyns

If fortune makes a wicked man prosperous and a good man poor, there is no need to wonder. For the wicked regard wealth as everything, the good as nothing. And the good fortune of the bad cannot take away their badness, while virtue alone will be enough for the good. — Sallust

What's the meaning of goodness if there isn't a little badness to overcome? — Anne Revere

The belief in a happy "state of nature" in the remote past is derived partly from the biblical narrative of the age of the patriarchs, partly from the classical myth of the golden age. The general belief in the badness of the remote past only came with the doctrine of evolution. — Bertrand Russell

Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness. — Michael Bassey Johnson

By developing a contaminated, stigmatized identity, the child victim takes the evil of the abuser into herself and thereby preserves her primary attachments to her parents. Because the inner sense of badness preserves a relationship, it is not readily given up even after the abuse has stopped; rather, it becomes a stable part of the child's personality structure. — Judith Lewis Herman

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop? — Anthony Burgess

Some people are naturally good, you know, and others are not. I'm one of the others. — L.M. Montgomery

I don't keep a record of the parts I've played, and I don't compare characters, but maybe I should? I could construct a graphic that grades badness and madness levels? Interesting idea. — James Frain

Oh the gladness of her gladness when she's glad, And the sadness of her sadness when she's sad; But the gladness of her gladness, And the sadness of her sadness, Are as nothing, Charles, To the badness of her badness when she is bad. — Khushwant Singh

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist.15 — Tad R. Callister

The good hate the badness of the wicked. The wicked hate the goodness of the good. — Anonymous

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. — Fulton J. Sheen

God has so ordered this world that no one can keep his goodness or badness exclusively to himself. — Mahatma Gandhi

In my family, goodness is just badness before its had something to drink. — Christopher Titus

No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful. — George MacDonald

The nature of a letter can also be revealed within its numeric value. All letters and numbers behave in a certain but recognizable way, from which we can deduce its nature. The number two is the only even prime. There is an inherent mathematical dilemma with, "one." No matter how many times you multiply it, by itself, you still can't get past "one" (1 x 1 x 1 x 1 = 1). So, how does "one" move beyond itself? How does the same, produce the different?
Mathematically, "one" is forced to divide itself and work from that duality. Therein, hides the divine puzzle of bet (b). To become "two," the second must revolt from wholeness - a separation. Yet, the second could not have existed without the benefit of the original wholeness. Also, the first wanted the second to exist, but the first doesn't know what the second will become. Again, two contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. (Ge 25:24) — Michael Ben Zehabe

All men have a little badness in them,' she whispered.
Milo looked at her. 'Sometimes, honey ... a woman can be just as evil as a man. — Kathy Hepinstall

The Bible frequently uses symmetries and inversions. By such comparisons (parallels and contrasts) the unique aspects of reality begin to emerge. Comparing two objects makes their differences increasingly apparent. Only then can we ask, "Why does this one have that, and the other does not?" For instance: The phrase, "and it was
6
good" is present on all the days of creation - except the second day. Why? Because, "two" contains potential badness, to a Hebrew. We could not have discovered that insight, unless we contrasted God's description of the creative days. — Michael Ben Zehabe

To swear day and night by media slander will make one a bigger victim than the slandered. It doesn't take much to begin to fear a mere illusion of human badness. — Criss Jami

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. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

They don't go into what is the cause of goodness, so why of the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of the brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? — Anthony Burgess

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by, But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steep is the way to it. — Hesiod

The first link between my soul and Christ is not my goodness but my badness, not my merit but my misery, not my riches but my need. — Charles Spurgeon

Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could be purged, somehow, of the projected not-them badness that they internalized and perhaps have acted out because their souls have been so damaged? Wouldn't it be incredible if everyone could find the joy that comes with committing to our own goodness? Perhaps we would stop dividing ourselves into malignancies of various forms. — Eve Ensler

Goodness ... You got to make it out of badness ... Because there isn't anything else to make it out of. — Robert Penn Warren

I guess what I get excited about when I'm thinking about projects is that toothy, complex area of goodness and badness and the gray areas of human behavior and existence. — Liz Garbus

Yo, back in the day, I was bad boned. I was tough, ok? Rugged. People feared me," Cain said.
"I'm sure they did."
"Are you doubting my mad badness? — Shelly Crane

Badness is only spoiled goodness. — C.S. Lewis

Is this what being a grown-up is like ? Badness and goodness squished together in a big ball of craziness ? — Kirstin Cronn-Mills

We believe that if we are bad, he is just waiting to unleash his wrath on us. The truth is that he has already unleashed his wrath on his Son for all of our badness. — Jessica Thompson

It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take "good", for instance. If you have a word like "good", what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well - better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good", what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning; or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words - in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course,' he added as an afterthought. A — George Orwell

Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst. — F.H. Bradley

Our goodness, our badness all develop from social experience, the company we keep, the things we're taught when we're young. We start with a clean slate. It's everyone else who fucks us up. — S. Walden

Every place there's people, there's badness. — Rae Carson

Goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Those who simply run away from sin are half-Christians. Our calling is much higher than simply running away from what's wrong. We're called to chase lions. — Mark Batterson

to ask simply whether religion is 'good' or 'bad' is to miss the point. Religion serves as a reason for war and peace, love and hatred, dialogue and narrow-mindedness. Religion can be used for many purposes, just as science can be used to develop life-saving vaccines or to build sophisticated weaponry. We may as well ask whether science is a good or bad thing, or cookery, poetry or politics. The 'goodness' or 'badness' of religion depends on the ways in which it is used, applied and lived out. — Symon Hill

I mean you well, Perses, you great idiot, and I will tell you. Look, badness is easy to have, you can take it by handfuls without effort. The road that way is smooth and starts here beside you. But between us and virtue the immortals have put what will make us sweat. The road to virtue is long and goes steep up hill, hard climbing at first, but the last of it, when you get to the summit (if you get there) is easy going after the hard part. — Hesiod

The Bible is not a witness to the best people making it up to God; it's a witness to God making it down to the worst people. Far from being a book full of moral heroes whom we are commanded to emulate, what we discover is that the so-called heroes in the Bible are not really heroes at all. They fall and fail; they make huge mistakes; they get afraid; they're selfish, deceptive, egotistical, and unreliable. The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. — Tullian Tchividjian

We cannot allow the badness to be triumphant on earth because we do not have a spare world! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

You don't have to be a good person to be a good writer
history shows it's better if you're not
but you have to understand your badness. — Peter Abrahams

The kentish week-enders on their way to church were appalled by the sight of four great hounds in full cry after two little girls. My uncle seemed to them like a wicked lord of fiction, and I became more than ever surrounded with an aura of madness, badness, and dangerousness for their children to know. — Nancy Mitford

Evil people hate the light because it reveals themselves to themselves. They hate goodness because it reveals their badness; they hate love because it reveals their laziness. They will destroy the light, the goodness, the love in order to avoid the pain of such self-awareness. — M. Scott Peck

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. — Margaret Deland

There's no such thing, you know, as picking out the best woman: it's only a question of comparative badness, brother. — Plautus

It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing. — Freya Stark

They'd begun to back down the long drive when he saw two little boys run out from behind Nate and Tamsyn. The DarkRiver male picked up the children and said something that made both his mate and the boys laugh. Judd looked away. That wasn't his life and it never would be. Yet even knowing that, Brenna had made her choice very clear.
And if she decided later that she wanted out?
The darkness, the badness in him, bared its teeth. Tonight-maybe tonight-he could set her free. After that, she'd have to kill him to get away. — Nalini Singh

If you have had a bad day, remember that tomorrow is a wonderful gift and a new chance to try again. — Bryant McGill

That day has come. God is now dealing with us in a new way. Our badness is no longer the obstacle to blessing. Nor is our goodness the condition for blessing. — Larry Crabb

If this is neither my own badness, nor an effect of my own badness, and the common weal is not injured, why am I troubled about it? And what is the harm to the common weal? — Marcus Aurelius

That evil wasn't glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness. — William Gibson

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these "high-falutin' to-dos," as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion - but most of all a deep loneliness and melancholy from which it took him almost a week to recover. He couldn't believe that such incredible wealth actually existed, that people really lived that way. It took him a long time, and a great many more parties, to realize that they didn't live that way, that it was all strangely unreal, a kind of beautiful dream the white folks were having, a lie they were telling themselves: that goodness can come from badness, that it's possible to be civilized with one another without treating as human beings those whose blood, sweat, and mother's milk made possible the life of privilege they led. — Alex Haley

The Bible is one long story of God meeting our rebellion with His rescue, our sin with His salvation, our guilt with His grace, our badness with His goodness. The overwhelming focus of the Bible is not the work of the redeemed but the work of the Redeemer. Which means that the Bible is not first a recipe for Christian living but a revelation book of Jesus who is the answer to our un-Christian living. — Tullian Tchividjian

He's seen enough to know that you can't kill all the badness in the world. You cut it down in front of you only to find that it's standing right behind you. — Moira Young

Le Chiffre was serving a wonderful purpose, a really vital purpose, perhaps the best and highest purpose of all. By his evil existence, which foolishly I have helped to destroy, he was creating a norm of badness by which, and by which alone, an opposite norm of goodness could exist. We were privileged, in our short knowledge of him, to see and estimate his wickedness and we emerge from the acquaintanceship better and more virtuous men. — Ian Fleming

The truth is that there are no good men, or bad men,' he said. 'It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good and evil. The truth is that an instant of real love, in the heart of anyone - the noblest man alive or the most wicked - has the whole purpose and process and meaning of life within the lotus-folds of its passion. The truth is that we are all, every one of us, every atom, every galaxy, and every particle of matter in the universe, moving toward God. — Gregory David Roberts

Sending children away to get control of their anger perpetuates the feeling of 'badness inside them ... Chances are they were already feeling not very good about themselves before the outburst and the isolation just serves to confirm in their own minds that they were right. — Otto Weininger

When beauty is defined, illusions of non-beauty manifest
When goodness is identified, badness becomes an option — Lao-Tzu

It is easy to love friends and sweethearts. This is selfish love. Higher love embraces enemies and all ugly, bad people. The highest love doesn't see goodness or badness at all. One should even love warmongers, bad food producers and priests. — Michio Kushi

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. — C.S. Lewis

I decide a book is bad if I get angrier and angrier as I read it. — Daniel T. O'Hara

This is bad," was all I could manage to say.
"Yeah, I kind of picked up on that too."
"No,I mean really bad. Like, to a level I didn't know badness could reach."
Archer crouched down near the lip of the crater, the flickering blue light playing in his eyes. "It gets worse."
"What,does this put also eat kittens? How much worse can it be? — Rachel Hawkins

When it comes to understanding and appreciating grace, our biggest problem is our so-called goodness ... not our self-perceived badness. — Tullian Tchividjian

Part of what I feel is that the so-called bad fairies are really only there to get you to pay some attention. They trick you up until you're lying flat on your back and you literally have another point of view. They're about loosening up being rigid. They trip you over to break the barrier between you and the world. So their so-called "badness" actually can be quite instrumental in helping you with things. — Brian Froud

But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative
useless synonyms for good or for bad. — C.S. Lewis

Is this how you repay my goodness
with badness?" cried the boy. "Of course," said the crocodile out of the corner of his mouth. "That is the way of the world. — Alex Haley

I showed her how I'd been making tiny cuts in my skin to let the badness and the pain leak out. They were shallow at first, and short, like claw marks made by a desperate cat that wanted to hid under the front porch. Cutting pain was a different flavor of hurt. It made it easier not to think about having my body and my family and my life stolen, made it easier not to care ... — Laurie Halse Anderson

Dirty Love wasn't written and directed, it was committed. Here is a film so pitiful, it doesn't rise to the level of badness. It is hopelessly incompetent I am not certain that anyone involved has ever seen a movie, or knows what one is. — Roger Ebert

The simplest way to not get caught doing a bad thing is to do it in front of everyone. Because most people are good - or scared, which is the same thing, functionally - and good people associate badness with guilt. Skulking, hiding. Lurking in the dark. They assume you feel their shame, that you'll try to hide your sins. They try to catch you in the shadows. No one looks for badness in the light. — Leah Raeder

Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all
sources. — Aristotle.

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. — J. E. Buckrose

Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists. They have been indignant, not about the badness of existence, but about the slowness of men in realizing
its goodness. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

But I'm still thinking about being born on a spaceship, an honest to badness spaceship. Growing up while flying along the stars, able to go wherever you wanted, not stuck on some hateful planet which clearly don't want you. You could go anywhere. If one place didn't suit, you'd find another. Full freedom in all direkshuns. Could there possibly be anything cooler in the whole world than that? — Patrick Ness

Neither Bwitists nor Fang felt they could eradicate ritual sin or evil in the world. This incapacity means that men have to celebrate. Good and bad walk together. As Fang frequently enough told missionaries, "We have two hearts, good and bad." Early missionaries, aware of these self-confessed contradictions, evangelized with the promise of "one heartedness" in Christianity. But Fang by and large did not find it there. For many, Christian one heartedness was a constriction of their selves. While "one heartedness" is celebrated in Bwiti, it is a one heartedness which is coagulated out of a flow of many qualities from one state to another. It is goodness achieved in the presence of badness, an aboveness achieved in the presence of belowness. It is an emergent quality energized in the presence of its opposite. — Terence McKenna

[Christ's] goodness is still a rebuke to our badness; His purity still shows up our impurities; His sinlessness still reveals our sinfulness; and unless we allow [Jesus] to destroy the evil within us, the evil within us still wants to destroy Him. This is the conflict of the ages. — Billy Graham

By the way, leafing through my dictionary I am struck by the poverty of language when it comes to naming or describing badness. Evil, wickedness, mischief, these words imply an agency, the conscious or at least active doing of wrong. They do not signify the bad in its inert, neutral, self-sustaining state. Then there are the adjectives: dreadful, heinous, execrable, vile, and so on. They are not so much as descriptive as judgmental. They carry a weight of censure mingled with fear. Is this not a queer state of affairs? It makes me wonder. I ask myself if perhaps the thing itself - badness - does not exist at all, if these strangely vague and imprecise words are only a kind of ruse, a kind of elaborate cover for the fact that nothing is there. Or perhaps words are an attempt to make it be there? Or, again, perhaps there is something, but the words invented it. Such considerations make me feel dizzy, as if a hole had opened briefly in the world. — John Banville

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. — C.S. Lewis

Here's the problem: when every sin is seen as the same, we are less likely to fight any sins at all. Why should I stop sleeping with my girlfriend when there will still be lust in my heart? Why pursue holiness when even one sin in my life means I'm Osama bin Hitler in God's eyes? Again, it seems humble to act as if no sin is worse than another, but we lose the impetus for striving and the ability to hold each other accountable when we tumble down the slip-n-slide of moral equivalence. All of a sudden the elder who battles the temptation to take a second look at the racy section of the Lands End catalog shouldn't dare exercise church discipline ont he young man fornicating with reckless abandon. When we can no longer see the different gradations among sins and sinners and sinful nations, we have not succeeded in respecting our own badness; we've cheapened God's goodness. — Kevin DeYoung

Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated [exemplified by] an Aristotlian syllogism:
All men are made in the image of God;
God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro;
Therefore, the Negro is not a man. — Martin Luther King Jr.