Your Badness Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

[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

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

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

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

Do you know that I am afraid that good people do a great deal of harm in this world? Certainly the greatest harm they do is that they make badness of such extraordinary importance. — Oscar Wilde

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

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

Is your badness so varied that it is still delightful? I expect anything gets boring after a while.'
He looked at her with interest. 'How perceptive you are. It takes a good deal of effort to keep badness from being boring. One must seek out new experiences and challenges. Our mutual friends may think I have an easy life, but being notorious is grueling work after a few years. — Madeline Hunter

Well - I have to say I personally have never drawn such a sharp line between 'good' and 'bad' as you. For me: that line is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can't exist without the other. As long as I am acting out of love, I feel I am doing best I know how. But you - wrapped up in judgment, always regretting the past, cursing yourself, blaming yourself, asking 'what if,' 'what if.' 'Life is cruel.' 'I wish I had died instead of.' Well - think about this. What if all your actions and choices, good or bad, make no difference to God? What if the pattern is pre-set? No no - hang on - this is a question worth struggling with. What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good? What if, for some of us, we can't get there any other way? — Donna Tartt

The difference between my darkness and your darkness is that I can look at my own badness in the face and accept its existence while you are busy covering your mirror with a white linen sheet. The difference between my sins and your sins is that when I sin I know I'm sinning while you have actually fallen prey to your own fabricated illusions. I am a siren, a mermaid; I know that I am beautiful while basking on the ocean's waves and I know that I can eat flesh and bones at the bottom of the sea. You are a white witch, a wizard; your spells are manipulations and your cauldron from hell yet you wrap yourself in white and wear a silver wig. — C. JoyBell C.

Empathy is the new measurement of everything. It doesn't matter what religion you have, what God you profess to believe in; it doesn't matter how rich you are or how poor you are, what church you go to or what church you don't go to; the only measure of character is empathy. Do you have empathy? You are a person of valuable character. Do you not have empathy for your fellow man? None of your rules and opinions, dogma and preferences, are going to save your soul. So I say it's empathy. Empathy is the new universal measurement of a man. — C. JoyBell C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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