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.
I had become, with the approach of night, once more aware of loneliness and time - those two companions without whom no journey can yield us anything.
The more afraid we are of the shadow of racism, the more conscious we might become of our own unsuspected biases.
How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
You can't help the poor by being one of them.
How can justice be attained when, in the expiation of an old wrong, another wrong is to be committed? No reasonable creature would conceive of the idea of obliterating ink stains with ink, or spots of oil with oil. Only blood must be washed out with blood.
Bright was the light of my last martini on my moral horizon
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