It is impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because naught contrary is produced by the contrary. Life does not generate death, nor is darkness the beginning of light, nor is disease the maker of health, but in the changes of conditions there are transitions from one condition to the contrary.
Basil of CaesareaRelated topics
beginning condition darkness death disease evil health light norRelated quotes
[S]ervants of darkness had no lasting joy in their service. In all of them the will for darkness was a perversion of the will for the light. In all but a few maniacs the satisfaction of the will for darkness was at all times countered by a revulsion which the unhappy spirit either dared not confess even to itself, or else rejected as cowardly and evil.
Olaf Stapledon
Everything that makes diversity of kinds, of species, differences, properties... everything that consists in generation, decay, alteration and change is not an entity, but a condition and circumstance of entity and being, which is one, infinite, immobile, subject, matter, life, death, truth, lies, good and evil.
Giordano Bruno
Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining.
Samuel Pepys
I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body now I know it to be merely a function of the mind -- and that of the minds who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists say it is the end the fundamentalists, the beginning when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.
William Faulkner