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.
What if when they called a war, no one went?
Life without Liberty is like a body without spirit. Liberty without thought is like a disturbed spirit.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
I tell the truth; listen everyone. Only those who have Loved, will realise the Lord
Exotic names, robes, insignia of office, titles - the trappings of religion - confuse as much as they help. They endorse the assumption of the existence of an elite whose explicit commitment grants them implicit extraordinariness.
We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
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