Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.
Interpretation
Evil can take its time to manifest, while goodness often requires prompt action to counter it.
This quote highlights the contrasting nature of evil and good. It suggests that harmful influences or behaviors often develop slowly and insidiously, much like a disease that gradually takes hold, whereas positive actions, represented by the doctor, need to be swift to effectively combat the negativity and restore health. The comparison underscores the urgency of promoting goodness in a world where evil can proliferate unchecked if not addressed promptly.
In practice
In a discussion about moral responsibility, one might use this quote to emphasize the need for proactive measures against wrongdoing.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
Secrecy is as indispensable to human beings as fire, and as greatly feared.
The American lives even more for his goals, for the future, than the European. Life for him is always becoming, never being.
Keep in mind, the news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class-the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up.
Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.
We cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves.
For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result.
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