Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point.

There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.

No man or woman of the humblest sort can really be strong, gentle, pure, and good without the world being better for it, without somebody being helped and comforted by the very existence of that goodness.

In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius did not sugarcoat life: “When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own — not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

True brilliance has a well-known positive correlation with decency, much of the time — a fact the rest of us rely on, more than we ever know. The real world doesn't roil with as many crazed artists, psychotic generals, dyspeptic writers, maniacal statesmen, insatiable tycoons, or mad scientists as you see in dramas.

What does God want? Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

Is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?

...alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging,

Remember that in the midst of that which is most tragic there is always the comic and in the midst that which is most evil there is always much good.

Life can be cruel, as you know. But it can also be kind. Filled with wonders. You need to remember that. You have your own choice to make, Armand. What’re you going to focus on? What’s unfair, or all the wonderful things that happen? Both are true, both are real. Both need to be accepted. But which carries more weight with you?” Stephen tapped the boy’s chest. “The terrible or the wonderful? The goodness or the cruelty? Your life will be decided by that choice.

There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Every experience, no matter how bad it seems, holds within it a blessing of some kind. The goal is to find it.