Conquer Evil With Good Quotes

There is no denying that there is evil in this world but the light will always conquer the darkness.

In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose – what we want most to be we are.

Weapons may be carried by creatures who are evil, dishonest, violent or lazy. The true warrior is good, gentle and honest. His bravery comes from within himself; he learns to conquer his own fears and misdeeds. —Matthias

The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat.

I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never by conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man’s meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil, struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

Armel shrugged. "I suppose so, Brother, but why do creatures have to fight?" Demple picked Mudge up and placed him on his shoulder. "Because there's always good and bad in the land, and goodbeasts have to protect their friends an' families from evil ones who want nothing but to conquer an' destroy.

Evil conquered?' said Gwydion. 'You have learned much, but learn this last and hardest of lessons. You have conquered only the enchantments of evil. That was the easiest of your tasks, only a beginning, not an ending. Do you believe evil itself to be so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them. Against these even a flaming sword cannot prevail, but only that portion of good in all men's hearts whose flame can never be quenched.

The devil knows how to play a good game. He is after one thing: He wants from you what he will never have, and that is breakthrough.

Fairy tales in childhood are stepping stones throughout life, leading the way through trouble and trial. The value of fairy tales lies not in a brief literary escape from reality, but in the gift of hope that goodness truly is more powerful than evil and that even the darkest reality can lead to a Happily Ever After. Do not take that gift of hope lightly. It has the power to conquer despair in the midst of sorrow, to light the darkness in the valleys of life, to whisper “One more time” in the face of failure. Hope is what gives life to dreams, making the fairy tale the reality.

The enemy has setups, but we have God’s Word and His promises and principles to fight the good fight of faith.

Eventually, good conquers evil, because evil works alone.

We try to fight the enemy with yesterday’s anointing for today’s battle. Yesterday’s anointing was good for yesterday—and for yesterday’s victory—but when we try to fight the new battles and new spiritual warfare of today, we learn a hard lesson: There are new levels and new devils.

When I say 'hero', do not picture someone with strength to fight and conquer evil – because evil is not something that can ever be conquered or defeated. Evil is natural. It is innate in all humans. But while it can't be defeated... it can be controlled. In order to control it, and live the life of a true hero, you must learn to see with eyes unclouded by hate. See the good in that which is evil, and the evil in that which is good. Pledge yourself to neither side, but vow instead to preserve the balance that exists between the two.

You have to make an enemy a friend to conquer his or her evil intentions.

Jesus on the cross feels the whole weight of the evil, and with the force of God's love he conquers it; he defeats it with his resurrection. This is the good that Jesus does for us on the throne of the cross. Christ's cross, embraced with love, never leads to sadness, but to joy, to the joy of having been saved and of doing a little of what he did on the day of his death.

My faith has been tempered in Hell. My faith has emerged from the flames of the crematoria, from the concrete of the gas chamber. I have seen that it is not man who is impotent in the struggle against evil, but the power of evil that is impotent in the struggle against man. The powerlessness of kindness, of senseless kindness, is the secret of its immortality. It can never be conquered. The more stupid, the more senseless, the more helpless it may seem, the vaster it is. Evil is impotent before it. The prophets, religious teachers, reformers, social and political leaders are impotent before it. This dumb, blind love is man's meaning. Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.

I believe in the simple things--the classic beginning of once upon a time, that good conquers evil in the end, fantasy and fate. My life is that of wondrous enchantment, a place of endless possibilities and dreams, where inspiration is found in the oddest of places. I aspire to inspire, and someday I will change the world,

If we kill those who are evil, we will become evil ourselves; we will be killers. If we attempt to deal with evil by destroying it, we will also end up destroying ourselves, spiritually if not physically. Evil can be defeated by goodness. Evil can be conquered only by love. We must somehow be both tolerant and intolerant, accepting and demanding, strict and flexible. An almost godlike compassion is required.

Evil" is an inverted anagram of "live." As we live our life, learn to tame our own private demons and conquer evil with a good, pure, humble, courageous, patient heart.

...there's goodness and purpose and reason out there. Believe it, embrace it, trust it. Life will always be hard, but if we do our best, if we persist, we can make a difference---and good will win out over evil, love will conquer hate...

...God sent His Prince, Jesus, into rebel territory to conquer evil and free us to be true citizens of the Kingdom again... That’s the essential story we find in the Bible, and it’s the essential story at the heart of each of our lives. And that’s what all good fantasy stories have at their core, whether or not it’s a conscious theme.

Humans are in delusion by default, and those who conquer their delusion can understand good and evil. Morality is an arbitrary abstract, it is not good or evil and those who provoke morality a righteous act, are still at the sideways of delusion and conquer.

Conquer hate with love and evil with goodness.

The Eternality of Good and Evil It is possible for good to conquer evil. But, an inconvenient truth mirrors the convenient truth - The convenient truth is that the seeds of good are ever present with evil. And the inconvenient truth is that the seeds of evil are ever present with good This is why war never ends, and never will. This is why only two realities exist in this context - (1) War; with the goal of defeating the enemy. AND (2) War; with the goal of preventing the enemies conception/birth.

Is it possible that power can conquer matter, that the soul makes a mightier truth than the body, that life has a meaning that survives life itself, that good survives evil as life survives death, that God, after all, is more powerful than the Devil?

You see death is a tool to degrade and destroy people, I see it as a life lesson that I use to empower myself and I remind myself that the dead are still alive. However, only the ones who are good, not evil pieces of shit like you will enjoy peace of mind

But he does not enter into temptation if he conquers his evil concupiscence by good will. And yet the determination of the human will is insufficient, unless the Lord grant it victory in answer to prayer that it enter not into temptation. What, indeed, affords clearer evidence of the grace of God than the acceptance of prayer in any petition?

If only everyone would conquer the evil within oneself the world would be one without territories.

My God, Sweetness beyond words, make bitter all the carnal comfort that draws me from love of the eternal and lures me to its evil self by the sight of some delightful good in the present. Let it not overcome me, my God. Let not flesh and blood conquer me. Let not the world and its brief glory deceive me, nor the devil trip me by his craftiness. Give me courage to resist, patience to endure, and constancy to persevere. Give me the soothing unction of Your spirit rather than all the consolations of the world, and in place of carnal love, infuse into me the love of Your name.

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

The law is an amazing tool, but it has limits. Good people, on the other hand, don't have limits. The law is not in the business of forgiveness or redemption. The law cannot compel us to love each other or respect each other. It cannot cancel hate or conquer evil; teach grace or extinguish passions. The law cannot achieve these things, not by itself. It takes people -- brave and strong and extraordinary people.

Historically, the gods of an existing religion become the demons of the conquering religion. That doesn’t make one evil and the other good, it just means that one tribe is better at waging war than the other.

The hero can prove what he is only by dying. The power of good is shown not by triumphantly conquering evil, but by continuing to resist evil while facing certain defeat. Such an attitude toward life seems at first sight fatalistic, but actually the decrees of an inexorable fate played no more part in the Norseman’s scheme of existence than predestination did in St. Paul’s or in that of his militant Protestant followers, and for precisely the same reason.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.13

You are a powerful talent. Good enough to conquer any evil. Good enough to find your happy ending, even if you've lost your way! Everything you need is inside you, Agatha. And now, more than ever, we need you to let it out. But if it's beauty holding you back, dear . . .

At its root, the logic is that of the Grand Inquisitor, who bitterly assailed Christ for offering people freedom and thus condemning them to misery. The Church must correct the evil work of Christ by offering the miserable mass of humanity the gift they most desire and need: absolute submission. It must “vanquish freedom” so as “to make men happy” and provide the total “community of worship” that they avidly seek. In the modern secular age, this means worship of the state religion, which in the Western democracies incorporates the doctrine of submission to the masters of the system of public subsidy, private profit, called free enterprise. The people must be kept in ignorance, reduced to jingoist incantations, for their own good. And like the Grand Inquisitor, who employs the forces of miracle, mystery, and authority “to conquer and hold captive for ever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness” and to deny them the freedom of choice they so fear and despise, so the “cool observers” must create the “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent oversimplifications” that keep the ignorant and stupid masses disciplined and content.

Ambition is, like other good things[.] a good only when use in moderation. It has worked great good for the world, and great evil also. [Ale]xander is an example of a man completely carried away by ambition: so much so that when he had conquered the whole world (which one would suppose was enough to satisfy ambition); he wept because there were no more world to conquer. Ambition is a good servant, but a hard master; and if you think it is likely to become your master: I would say to you in the words of the immortals Shakespeare: 'Cromwell, I charge thee fling away ambition, by that sin fell the angels.

Avoid generalizations. As a fiction writer, I distrust absolute truths, homilies, bromides, sound bites, and also shorthand advice of the sort I’m giving. I like specifics, the longhand version of a story in which it takes four hundred pages to answer a single question about a person’s character. Literary writers, unless they are writing fairly tales, learn early never to have characters who are polar opposites, one “good,” the other “evil.” That’s not believable. People are more than just good and evil. Intelligent readers will demand that you not reduce people to such simplistic terms, or resolve situations with “Good always conquers evil,” “Might is always right,” and so forth. And while such resolutions are common in murder mysteries and action stories, they are feeble in literary fiction, which is supposed to reflect subtle truths about the world. Better to be subtle rather than overbearing, subversive rather than didactic.

There are some who would vow that life isn’t fair. They believe the worst is yet to come, that evil will always conquer good, and that we have no control over our fate. It’s true, there are storms that shake our foundations and monsters that threaten to tear us limb from limb. We will make terrible mistakes. We will fall short of our expectations. No one is exempt from pain and fear. But life, and what comes after, is a beautiful mixture of darkness and light, sacrifice and salvation. There is no fine line between the two, for both are needed. Where there is grief, there will be joy. Where there is heartbreak, love will follow.

Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after. The barbarian Andrew Jackson rejoiced in mass murder, regaled in enslavement, and died a national hero. For three decades, J. Edgar Hoover incited murder and perfected blackmail against citizens who only sought some equal pursuit of liberty and happiness. Today his name is affixed to a building that we are told was erected in the pursuit of justice. Hitler pushed an entire people to the brink of extinction, escaped human censure, and now finds acolytes among some of the very states he conquered. The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.

are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds, that we may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God. A real work is to be wrought in us and upon us. Besetting sins are to be conquered; evil habits are to be overcome; wrong dispositions and feelings are to be rooted out, and holy tempers and emotions are to be begotten. A

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace…. Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example—a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs … and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

A godly man will forgive those who have wronged him Revenge is sweet to nature. A gracious spirit passes by affronts, forgets injuries and counts it a greater victory to conquer an enemy by patience than by power. It is truly heroic "to overcome evil with good" (Romans 12:21). Though I would not trust an enemy—yet I would endeavor to love him. I would exclude him from my creed—but not from my prayer (Matt. 5:44).

Wicca does not operate this way, because light conquering dark means that the world is out of balance. Evil conquering good, means harmony has been upset. This is why a God and Goddess are celebrated. They believe that these figures, which would seem to be opposed, actually live in harmony with one another, each contributing what the other cannot and providing the essential ingredients for the universe to exist as it does.

Why rage against bad people? “Because they’re bad,” you say. You add yourself to their number by raging against them. Let me give you some advice: Are you being bothered by a bad person? Don’t make there be two of you. By condemning the person, you join them. You increase the number under judgment. You want to defeat bad with bad and conquer evil with evil?... Have you not heard the Lord’s advice: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good”? 

God resists our evil and conquers it with good, or how could God ask the same of us?! Think about that. God shocks and stuns us into love. God does not love us if we change, God loves us so that we can change. Only love effects true inner transformation, not duress, guilt, shunning, or social pressure. Love is not love unless it is totally free. Grace is not grace unless it is totally free. You would think Christian people would know that by now, but it is still a secret of the soul.

But that wasn't the chief thing that bothered me: I couldn't reconcile myself with that preoccupation with sin that, so far as I could tell, was never entirely absent from the monks' thoughts. I'd known a lot of fellows in the air corps. Of course they got drunk when they got a chance, and had a girl whenever they could and used foul language; we had one or two had hats: one fellow was arrested for passing rubber cheques and was sent to prison for six months; it wasn't altogether his fault; he'd never had any money before, and when he got more than he'd ever dreamt of having, it went to his head. I'd known had men in Paris and when I got back to Chicago I knew more, but for the most part their badness was due to heredity, which they couldn't help, or to their environment, which they didn't choose: I'm not sure that society wasn't more responsible for their crimes than they were. If I'd been God I couldn't have brought myself to condemn one of them, not even the worst, to eternal damnation. Father Esheim was broad-minded; he thought that hell was the deprivation of God's presence, but if that is such an intolerable punishment that it can justly be called hell, can one conceive that a good God can inflict it? After all, he created men, if he so created them that ti was possible for them to sin, it was because he willed it. If I trained a dog to fly at the throat of any stranger who came into by back yard, it wouldn't be fair to beat him when he did so. If an all-good and all-powerful God created the world, why did he create evil? The monks said, so that man by conquering the wickedness in him, by resisting temptation, by accepting pain and sorrow and misfortune as the trials sent by God to purify him, might at long last be made worthy to receive his grace. It seem to me like sending a fellow with a message to some place and just to make it harder for him you constructed a maze that he had to get through, then dug a moat that he had to swim and finally built a wall that he had to scale. I wasn't prepared to believe in an all-wise God who hadn't common sense. I didn't see why you shouldn't believe in a God who hadn't created the world, buyt had to make the best of the bad job he'd found, a being enormously better, wiser and greater than man, who strove with the evil he hadn't made and who might be hoped in the end to overcome it. But on the other hand I didn't see why you should.

Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the world. These are the Grand Inquisitors who imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and unification of the world. The first step is to conquer and rule. The kingdom of heaven will, in fact, appear on earth, but it will be ruled over by men—a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Cassars, because they were the first to understand—and later, with time, by all men. The unity of all creation will be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted. The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired, for the knowledge he possesses is-bitter. He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil. He has pity, a cold pity, for the silent prisoner whom history endlessly deceives. He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and, in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the Caesars. But the prisoner does not speak. The enterprise will continue, therefore, without him; he will be killed.

Don’t let HATE hijack your HEART. Don’t let FEAR and TERRORISM brainwash your MIND. Don’t let EVIL and WAR conquer your SOUL. Don’t let NEGATIVITY and ANGER poison your SPIRIT. Focus on the GOOD and the POSITIVE. Be HAPPY and KIND. LEARN from the negative. Recognize your BLESSINGS. Find the HUMOR when possible. Do unto others as you’d have KARMA do unto you. Instead of asking yourself, “what’s in it for me?”, ask yourself, “what’s in it for the GREATER GOOD?”. Stay VIGILANT, but don’t let fear and worry consume you. RESPECT and ACCEPT differences. Continue to LIVE, LOVE and LAUGH and encourage and inspire others to be AWESOME.

This recurred to his mind unceasingly. To this celestial kindness he opposed pride, which is the fortress of evil within us. He was indistinctly conscious that the pardon of this priest was the greatest assault and the most formidable attack which had moved him yet; that his obduracy was finally settled if he resisted this clemency; that if he yielded, he should be obliged to renounce that hatred with which the actions of other men had filled his soul through so many years, and which pleased him; that this time it was necessary to conquer or to be conquered; and that a struggle, a colossal and final struggle, had been begun between his viciousness and the goodness of that man.

But it wouldn’t have half the power of a story in which Jamie and Claire truly conquer real evil and thus show what real love is. Real love has real costs—and they’re worth it. I’ve always said all my books have a shape, and Outlander’s internal geometry consists of three slightly overlapping triangles. The apex of each triangle is one of the three emotional climaxes of the book: 1) when Claire makes her wrenching choice at the stones and stays with Jamie, 2) when she saves Jamie from Wentworth, and 3) when she saves his soul at the abbey. It would still be a good story if I’d had only 1 and 2—but (see above), the Rule of Three. A story that goes one, two, three, has a lot more impact than just a one–two punch.

When the course of civilization takes an unexpected turn—when, instead of the continuous progress which we have come to expect, we find ourselves threatened by evils associated by us with past ages of barbarism—we naturally blame anything but ourselves. Have we not all striven according to our best lights, and have not many of our finest minds incessantly worked to make this a better world? Have not all our efforts and hopes been directed toward greater freedom, justice, and prosperity? If the outcome is so different from our aims— if, instead of freedom and prosperity, bondage and misery stare us in the face—is it not clear that sinister forces must have foiled our intentions, that we are the victims of some evil power which must be conquered before we can resume the road to better things? However much we may differ when we name the culprit—whether it is the wicked capitalist or the vicious spirit of a particular nation, the stupidity of our elders, or a social system not yet, although we have struggled against it for half a century, fully overthrown—we all are, or at last were until recently, certain of one thing: that the leading ideas which during the last generation have become common to most people of good will and have determined the major changes in our social life cannot have been wrong. We are ready to accept almost any explanation of the present crisis of our civilization except one: that the present state of the world may be the result of genuine error on our own part and that the pursuit of some of our most cherished ideals has apparently produced results utterly different from those which we expected.

By the law we fear God; by faith we hope in God: but from those who fear punishment grace is hidden. And the soul which labours under this fear, since it has not conquered its evil concupiscence, and from which this fear, like a harsh master, has not departed,--let it flee by faith for refuge to the mercy of God, that He may give it what He commands, and may, by inspiring into it the sweetness of His grace through His Holy Spirit, cause the soul to delight more in what He teaches it, than it delights in what opposes His instruction. In this manner it is that the great abundance of His sweetness,--that is, the law of faith,--His love which is in our hearts, and shed abroad, is perfected in them that hope in Him, that good may be wrought by the soul, healed not by the fear of punishment, but by the love of righteousness.

Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benefit of the sinner. One might read Christ's answer to his disciples' question regarding why a man had been born blind - 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him' (John 9:3) - either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if - setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as superstitious, stochastic, and secondary - we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

There was one monk who never spoke up. His name was Vappa, and he seemed the most insecure about Gautama coming back to life. When he was taken aside and told that he would be enlightened, Vappa greeted the news with doubt. “If what you tell me is true, I would feel something, and I don’t,” he said. “When you dig a well, there is no sign of water until you reach it, only rocks and dirt to move out of the way. You have removed enough; soon the pure water will flow,” said Buddha. But instead of being reassured, Vappa threw himself on the ground, weeping and grasping Buddha’s feet. “It will never happen,” he moaned. “Don’t fill me with false hope.” “I’m not offering hope,” said Buddha. “Your karma brought you to me, along with the other four. I can see that you will soon be awake.” “Then why do I have so many impure thoughts?” asked Vappa, who was prickly and prone to outbursts of rage, so much so that the other monks were intimidated by him. “Don’t trust your thoughts,” said Buddha. “You can’t think yourself awake.” “I have stolen food when I was famished, and there were times when I stole away from my brothers and went to women,” said Vappa. “Don’t trust your actions. They belong to the body,” said Buddha. “Your body can’t wake you up.” Vappa remained miserable, his expression hardening the more Buddha spoke. “I should go away from here. You say there is no war between good and evil, but I feel it inside. I feel how good you are, and it only makes me feel worse.” Vappa’s anguish was so genuine that Buddha felt a twinge of temptation. He could reach out and take Vappa’s guilt from his shoulders with a touch of the hand. But making Vappa happy wasn’t the same as setting him free, and Buddha knew he couldn’t touch every person on earth. He said, “I can see that you are at war inside, Vappa. You must believe me when I say that you’ll never win.” Vappa hung his head lower. “I know that. So I must go?” “No, you misunderstand me,” Buddha said gently. “No one has ever won the war. Good opposes evil the way the summer sun opposes winter cold, the way light opposes darkness. They are built into the eternal scheme of Nature.” “But you won. You are good; I feel it,” said Vappa. “What you feel is the being I have inside, just as you have it,” said Buddha. “I did not conquer evil or embrace good. I detached myself from both.” “How?” “It wasn’t difficult. Once I admitted to myself that I would never become completely good or free from sin, something changed inside. I was no longer distracted by the war; my attention could go somewhere else. It went beyond my body, and I saw who I really am. I am not a warrior. I am not a prisoner of desire. Those things come and go. I asked myself: Who is watching the war? Who do I return to when pain is over, or when pleasure is over? Who is content simply to be? You too have felt the peace of simply being. Wake up to that, and you will join me in being free.” This lesson had an immense effect on Vappa, who made it his mission for the rest of his life to seek out the most miserable and hopeless people in society. He was convinced that Buddha had revealed a truth that every person could recognize: suffering is a fixed part of life. Fleeing from pain and running toward pleasure would never change that fact. Yet most people spent their whole lives avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. To them, this was only natural, but in reality they were becoming deeply involved in a war they could never win.

God’s goodness comes to us amidst the battle and dust of our own suffering, our own long defeat. God always arrives with healing. But he is humble and meek, a king who comes in through the back door of our hearts not to conquer and raze our imperfections away but to hold and heal us by the intimacy of his touch, his presence here with us in the inmost rooms of our suffering. The power of God is radically gentle, never rough with our needs or careless with our yearning. God is fixed upon the restoration of our whole selves and souls, not just the bits that everyone else can see. Yet the very tenderness of his power is something we sometimes treat as his weakness or cruelty because we crave a more visible result. The healing kind of power is not the sort we’ve been taught to respect by existence in a fallen world where power just means brute force. We want the swift and the visible: illness zapped away, money in our hands, brilliant doctors, prosperous lives, and conversion stories by the thousands. We crave visibility and approbation and health and big crowds that make us feel important enough to forget the frail selves we used to be. When we pray for God to come in power to save us, we often picture a scenario in which God invades our lives as the ultimate mighty man to banish our frailty and make us something entirely other than we are, capable of the will and force whose lack we so deeply feel. But God cradles and cherishes our frailty, and that is where the true power of his love is known. I always think it intriguing that in the Gospels Jesus seems far less interested in the faith and hope at work in broken people than merely the healing of their bodies. For I think God knows there is no real healing until our hearts are healed of their fear, our minds cleansed of doubt. Broken bodies, shattered hopes, suffering minds, terrible pasts - they leave us deathly ill with the twisted belief that love can never be great enough to encompass the whole of the story. We feel that we must subtract or conceal part of ourselves if we are ever to win the love of other people or God himself. We are diminished in our own eyes by our suffering, taught to despair of our dreams, to give up our hope that God will come with goodness in his hands. So God creeps in, gentle, and we know his touch because we are not discarded or dismissed, but healed. He comes to unravel our self-doubt, to untangle the evil we have believed, to call us back from the dark lands of our insecurity. He calls us by name and wakes us from sleep so that we rise to ask what this kind and precious King commands, and so often his command is simply to open our hands so that they may be filled with his goodness. For when God arrives as the healer, we learn anew that the anguished hopes we carry are held within God’s hand like the hazelnut of Mother Julian’s vision. The story he weaves for us may look radically different from what we thought we desired, but when it arrives, we will recognize it as the intimate gift of a love whose will for us is always so much greater than our own.

One thing is needful.—To "give style" to one’s character— a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large mass of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed —both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! It will be the strong and domineering natures that enjoy their finest gaiety in such constraint and perfection under a law of their own; the passion of their tremendous will relaxes in the face of all stylized nature, of all conquered and serving nature. Even when they have to build palaces and design gardens they demur at giving nature freedom. Conversely, it is the weak characters without power over themselves that hate the constraint of style. They feel that if this bitter and evil constraint were imposed upon them they would be demeaned; they become slaves as soon as they serve; they hate to serve. Such spirits—and they may be of the first rank—are always out to shape and interpret their environment as free nature: wild, arbitrary, fantastic, disorderly, and surprising. And they are well advised because it is only in this way that they can give pleasure to themselves. For one thing is needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself, whether it be by means of this or that poetry or art; only then is a human being at all tolerable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims, if only by having to endure his ugly sight. For the sight of what is ugly makes one bad and gloomy.

I do not expect everyone to like me; but I would be extremely surprised if a person whom I consider highly spiritual, a person that I properly evaluate and conclude to be mentally healthy and very sane, a person that is mostly and foremost good at heart, hated me. That is an impossibility, as I have confirmed after traveling the whole world and meeting thousands of human beings. Evil and good do not resonate at the same frequency, and that is what disgust, distrust and lower affinity mean. And so, we are then allowed to conclude that whoever loves everyone doest not know himself, and whoever hates everyone doest not understand the purpose of life; but one who can see this polarity and interfere with its order without being a part of it, has transcended the trap of attachment, a trap which can only be conquered once we conquer our need for a personality and the attachment to the ego; a trap from which nobody seeking for selfish gains in the wilderness of attachment can escape from. Only then, such enlightened soul will understand that the outer world is merely reflecting the inner world, and a soul cannot conquer one without conquering the other. In other words, the spirit must conquer the personality, as much as the personality must accept the spirit, for victory over life to come as much as we reach for it. Only when a marriage between the willpower of the personality with the sensitive loving need of the spirit is accomplished, can a human being transcend his nature, and in doing so, transcend the nature of the world.

Then one evening he reached the last chapter, and then the last page, the last verse. And there it was! That unforgivable and unfathomable misprint that had caused the owner of the books to order them to be pulped. Now Bosse handed a copy to each of them sitting round the table, and they thumbed through to the very last verse, and one by one burst out laughing. Bosse was happy enough to find the misprint. He had no interest in finding out how it got there. He had satisfied his curiosity, and in the process had read his first book since his schooldays, and even got a bit religious while he was at it. Not that Bosse allowed God to have any opinion about Bellringer Farm’s business enterprise, nor did he allow the Lord to be present when he filed his tax return, but – in other respects – Bosse now placed his life in the hands of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And surely none of them would worry about the fact that he set up his stall at markets on Saturdays and sold bibles with a tiny misprint in them? (‘Only ninety-nine crowns each! Jesus! What a bargain!’) But if Bosse had cared, and if, against all odds, he had managed to get to the bottom of it, then after what he had told his friends, he would have continued: A typesetter in a Rotterdam suburb had been through a personal crisis. Several years earlier, he had been recruited by Jehovah’s Witnesses but they had thrown him out when he discovered, and questioned rather too loudly, the fact that the congregation had predicted the return of Jesus on no less than fourteen occasions between 1799 and 1980 – and sensationally managed to get it wrong all fourteen times. Upon which, the typesetter had joined the Pentecostal Church; he liked their teachings about the Last Judgment, he could embrace the idea of God’s final victory over evil, the return of Jesus (without their actually naming a date) and how most of the people from the typesetter’s childhood including his own father, would burn in hell. But this new congregation sent him packing too. A whole month’s collections had gone astray while in the care of the typesetter. He had sworn by all that was holy that the disappearance had nothing to do with him. Besides, shouldn’t Christians forgive? And what choice did he have when his car broke down and he needed a new one to keep his job? As bitter as bile, the typesetter started the layout for that day’s jobs, which ironically happened to consist of printing two thousand bibles! And besides, it was an order from Sweden where as far as the typesetter knew, his father still lived after having abandoned his family when the typesetter was six years old. With tears in his eyes, the typesetter set the text of chapter upon chapter. When he came to the very last chapter – the Book of Revelation – he just lost it. How could Jesus ever want to come back to Earth? Here where Evil had once and for all conquered Good, so what was the point of anything? And the Bible… It was just a joke! So it came about that the typesetter with the shattered nerves made a little addition to the very last verse in the very last chapter in the Swedish bible that was just about to be printed. The typesetter didn’t remember much of his father’s tongue, but he could at least recall a nursery rhyme that was well suited in the context. Thus the bible’s last two verses plus the typesetter’s extra verse were printed as: 20. He who testifies to these things says, Surely I am coming quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!21. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.22. And they all lived happily ever after.

The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me." Psalm 138:8 Most manifestly the confidence which the Psalmist here expressed was a divine confidence. He did not say, "I have grace enough to perfect that which concerneth me--my faith is so steady that it will not stagger--my love is so warm that it will never grow cold--my resolution is so firm that nothing can move it"; no, his dependence was on the Lord alone. If we indulge in any confidence which is not grounded on the Rock of Ages, our confidence is worse than a dream, it will fall upon us, and cover us with its ruins, to our sorrow and confusion. All that Nature spins time will unravel, to the eternal confusion of all who are clothed therein. The Psalmist was wise, he rested upon nothing short of the Lord's work. It is the Lord who has begun the good work within us; it is he who has carried it on; and if he does not finish it, it never will be complete. If there be one stitch in the celestial garment of our righteousness which we are to insert ourselves, then we are lost; but this is our confidence, the Lord who began will perfect. He has done it all, must do it all, and will do it all. Our confidence must not be in what we have done, nor in what we have resolved to do, but entirely in what the Lord will do. Unbelief insinuates--"You will never be able to stand. Look at the evil of your heart, you can never conquer sin; remember the sinful pleasures and temptations of the world that beset you, you will be certainly allured by them and led astray." Ah! yes, we should indeed perish if left to our own strength. If we had alone to navigate our frail vessels over so rough a sea, we might well give up the voyage in despair; but, thanks be to God, he will perfect that which concerneth us, and bring us to the desired haven. We can never be too confident when we confide in him alone, and never too much concerned to have such a trust.

Arthur was tired out. He had been broken by the two battles which he had fought already, the one at Dover, the other at Barbara Down. His wife was a prisoner. His oldest friend was banished. His son was trying to kill him. Gawaine was buried. His Table was dispersed. His country was at war. Yet he could have breasted all these things in some way, if the central tenet of his heart had not been ravaged. Long ago, when his mind had been a nimble boy's called Wart—long ago he had been taught by an aged benevolence, wagging a white beard. He had been taught by Merlyn to believe that man was perfectible: that he was on the whole more decent than beastly: that good was worth trying: that there was no such thing as original sin. He had been forged as a weapon for the aid of man, on the assumption that men were good. He had been forged, by that deluded old teacher, into a sort of Pasteur or Curie or patient discoverer of insulin. The service for which he had been destined had been against Force, the mental illness of humanity. His Table, his idea of Chivalry, his Holy Grail, his devotion to Justice: these had been progressive steps in the effort for which he had been bred He was like a scientist who had pursued the root of cancer all his life. Might—to have ended it— to have made men happier. But the whole structure depended on the first premise: that man was decent. Looking back at his life, it seemed to him that he had been struggling all the time to dam a flood, which, whenever he had checked it, had broken through at a new place, setting him his work to do again. It was the flood of Force Majeur. During the earliest days before his marriage he had tried to match its strength with strength—in his battles against the Gaelic confederation—only to find that two wrongs did not make a right. But he had crushed the feudal dream of war successfully. Then, with his Round Table, he had tried to harness Tyranny in lesser forms, so that its power might be used for useful ends. He had sent out the men of might to rescue the oppressed and to straighten evil —to put down the individual might of barons, just as he had put down the might of kings. They had done so—until, in the course of time, the ends had been achieved, but the force had remained upon his hands unchastened. So he had sought for a new channel, had sent them out on God's business, searching for the Holy Grail. That too had been a failure, because those who had achieved the Quest had become perfect and been lost to the world, while those who had failed in it had soon returned no better. At last he had sought to make a map of force, as it were, to bind it down by laws. He had tried to codify the evil uses of might by individuals, so that he might set bounds to them by the impersonal justice of the state. He had been prepared to sacrifice his wife and his best friend, to the impersonality of Justice. And then, even as the might of the individual seemed to have been curbed, the Principle of Might had sprung up behind him in another shape—in the shape of collective might, of banded ferocity, of numerous armies insusceptible to individual laws. He had bound the might of units, only to find that it was assumed by pluralities. He had conquered murder, to be faced with war. There were no Laws for that.

Good men have only to do nothing, for evil to conquer" (137).

I do not expect everyone to like me; but I would be extremely surprised if a person whom I consider highly spiritual, a person that I properly evaluate and conclude to be mentally healthy and very sane, a person that is mostly and foremost good at heart, hated me. That is an impossibility, as I have confirmed after traveling the whole world and meeting thousands of human beings. Evil and good do not resonate at the same frequency, and that is what disgust, distrust and lower affinity mean. And so, we are then allowed to conclude that whoever loves everyone does not know himself, and whoever hates everyone doest not understand the purpose of life; but one who can see this polarity and interfere with its order without being a part of it, has transcended the trap of attachment, a trap which can only be conquered once we conquer our need for a personality and the attachment to the ego; a trap from which nobody seeking for selfish gains in the wilderness of attachment can escape from. Only then, such enlightened soul will understand that the outer world is merely reflecting the inner world, and a soul cannot conquer one without conquering the other. In other words, the spirit must conquer the personality, as much as the personality must accept the spirit, for victory over life to come as much as we reach for it. Only when a marriage between the willpower of the personality with the sensitive loving need of the spirit is accomplished, can a human being transcend his nature, and in doing so, transcend the nature of the world.

The fight between them had to be according to the laws of the wild: the stronger would win. For good or for evil. Therefore, it wouldn’t be right to attack Nana in one of her weak moments. If you really want to conquer evil, you have to face all its power and potential: you can’t use trickery.

Whenever we get tired – in our work, in our studies, in our apostolic endeavours – when our horizon is darkened by lowering clouds, then let us turn our eyes to Jesus, to Jesus who is so good, and who also gets tired; to Jesus who is hungry and suffers thirst. Lord, how well you make yourself understood! How lovable you are! You show us that you are just like us, in everything but sin, so that we can feel utterly sure that, together with you, we can conquer all our evil inclinations, all our faults. For neither weariness nor hunger matter, nor thirst, nor tears ... since Christ also grew weary, knew hunger, was thirsty, and wept. What is important is that we struggle to fulfil the Will of our heavenly Father (cf John 4:34).[653]

I choose instead to emphasis factors that unite. Now beware, the forces of evil are always seeking to divide and conquer. Beware of any opinion or attitudes that try to create divisions and break up unity, often such forces are all working for the dark side. As long as good-hearted and right-minded people come together, without any basis of falsehood or self delusion, this should be a gathering of strength.

Enlightened Consciousness is not an Intellectual Insight. Enlightened Consciousness is not a bare intellectual insight, for it is full of beautiful emotions. It loves, caresses, embraces, and at the same time esteems all beings, being ever merciful to them. It has no enemies to conquer, no evil to fight with, but constantly finds friends to help, good to promote. Its warm heart beats in harmony with those of all fellow beings.

I love your life because you want others to love your life. I love your life because you love your life.I love your life because you do not apply perfume after bath.I love your life because your face shines. I love your life because I love my life.I love your life because you are black like me.I love your life because you are white as I was.I love your life because you have all the races and tones and tastes that I had one day.I love your life because I died for it.I love your life because I live for it.I love your life for feeling love for the nature of love.I love your life because I love the water.I love your life because I love enjoying it in the bath.I love your life because I love to push your wheelchair.I love your life because you give me wheels.I love your life because I want to love I love your life because you sin against me today and I love your life because you forgive me in front of the mirror. I love your life because I love lying down with you. I love your life because I love your everyday meal. I love your life because you got me used to love your life. I love your life because you conquer yourself every day. I love your life because Jesus is ahead. I love your life because you identify with the good and the evil of your life. I love your life.

Only be doing good can evil be conquered.

What do you take me for! Brain scientist here! You know what it means? It means I know your deepest fantasies as well as your darkest secrets - it means I know more about you than you know about yourself. Yet have I ever belittled you? Never! You know why? Because, by knowing the worst in you I came to now the best in you. Know your worst my friend - for once you conquer your worst you'll automatically manifest your best.

A pompous, arrogant, narcissistic intellectual came up to me at a conference and said rather boastfully. "You must feel really good about yourself to be the nice guy all the time! But let me tell you something - it takes balls to say what's really on your mind. You might have heard, the best defense is a good offense..." He went on and on for a while, and the more he spoke the more his intolerant nature became evident. I listened to everything he had to say, then heaved a soft sight, and replied with a smile. "You are absolutely right! Ama senin gibi şerefsiz olmak insanın lazım yok - porque, no soy un hijo de puta como tú - nu okka chetta na kodakkala behave cheskovachhu, kaani naaku anthaa scene ledu." He looked rather annoyed, because all my words went over his head, so he flared out, "don't beat around the bush, man - say, what you want to say!" I spoke calmly. "I'd love to speak my mind, but I wouldn't want to give anyone an inferiority complex. Bad behavior don't make us cool, it only exposes the fool we are. If bad behavior made the world better, we'd already be living in utopia, instead of still struggling for basic human rights." I didn't want the argument to linger any longer, so I asked him to join me for lunch. You see, self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.

Don’t tie yourself to a woman who has love to fight for; she will always prevail. Good will always conquer evil.

May the innocent people who died on the bloody soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina be forever remembered. May the voices of Sarajevo be heard throughout the world. May the mothers of Srebrenica (where 8,372 Bosniak men and boys were killed in cold blood) know that justice and truth is on their side. The forces of good and evil will always exist. The conflict between them shows the contradictions that live in human nature. We must ensure that love conquers hate.

May I not hoard wealth, nor be foolish in my use of it. A meaningless life is a grievous evil because it is separation from You who are goodness itself. Let my words to You be few and sincere – for the more the words, the less the meaning. Father, every day with You is a better day. May You grant me the inheritance, shelter and life of Your wisdom. All I do is in Your hands. Perhaps it is making a difference or perhaps I am chasing the wind. You alone know. So, whatever I do, I will do to the best of my abilities. Let me not be dismayed about whether my efforts are recognised on this earth, for You see all that I do. I pray and hope that my wisdom will not be spoilt by folly and experimentation. Thank You, Holy Spirit, for giving me calmness and self-control. Let me not dig myself a pit with my own actions and words. I cannot understand Your work and Your ways, O God, maker of all things. But I understand that I can trust You and that You delight in walking alongside me. So I will not watch my circumstances, but will draw near to listen to You. I sowed my seed at work and at home, not knowing if I would succeed, but knowing You are there for me. Prepare me for days of darkness, for there is no dark that You do not give light to, no matter how dim the light seems. Let the days of my life honour You; let me fear You and keep Your commandments; let me enter into the joy of Your grace; let me do Your will; until my spirit returns to You who gave it. Amen

good conquers evil, because evil works alone.

It is enough for the disciple to be as his Lord,’ and to learn also to overcome evil with good. There is absolutely no experience, however terrible, or heartbreaking, or unjust, or cruel, or evil, which you can meet in the course of your earthly life, that can harm you if you will but let me teach you how to accept it with joy; and to react to it triumphantly as I did myself, with love and forgiveness and with willingness to bear the results of wrong done by others. Every trial, every test, every difficulty and seemingly wrong experience through which you may have to pass, is only another opportunity granted to you of conquering an evil thing and bringing out

Conquer anger by love. Conquer evil by good. Conquer the stingy by giving. Conquer the liar by truth. Gautama Buddha

Love trumped hate. Good conquered evil. When you drew your last breath, you didn’t think about the people you loathed. You thought about those you loved.

Never allow evil to conquer you. But overcome evil with good deeds.

This process of taking ownership of my life and circumstances has always been worth the fight. In a quote attributed to author Robert Louis Stevenson, he said: “In each of us, two natures are at war—the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our own hands lies the power to choose—what we want most to be, we are.

Consider also that the fellow creature whom you hate is either a just man or a sinner. If a just man, it is certainly a great misfortune to be the declared enemy of a friend of God. If a sinner, it is no less deplorable that you should undertake to punish the malice of another by plunging your own soul into sin. And if your neighbor in his turn seeks vengeance for the injury you inflict upon him, where will your enmities end? Will there be any peace on the earth?   The Apostle teaches us a more noble revenge when he tells us "not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil by good" (Rom. 12:21 ) – that is, to triumph by our virtues over .the vices of our brethren. In endeavoring to bc revenged upon a fellow creature you are often disappointed and vanquished by anger itself. But if you overcome your passion, you gain a more glorious victory than he who conquers a city. Our noblest triumph is won by subduing ourselves, by subjecting our passions to the empire of reason,

9Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good;f 10love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor.g 11Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord.h 12Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer.i 13Contribute to the needs of the holy ones,j exercise hospitality. 14* Bless those who persecute [you],k bless and do not curse them.l 15Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep.m 16Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation.n 17Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all.o 18If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.p 19Beloved, do not look for revenge but leave room for the wrath; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”q 20Rather, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head.”r 21Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.

The only force that can conquer evil is good.

Fighting violence with violence is like fighting wrong with more wrong, thus compounding the evil without introducing the good. For Gandhi, evil could only be conquered by superior virtue, not superior force. All

I believe in the indomitable strength of the human will,” he said. “I believe good can conquer evil. And, even though it has been a long time for me, I believe in love.

Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.

Conquer anger by love. Conquer evil by good. Conquer the stingy by giving. Conquer the liar by truth.” – Dhammapada

The thought turned him topsy-turvy. It seemed to summarize the whole worthless way of the world--if there was one. And versions of it began to flutter wildly through his head. You have to look round to see straight. Good enough. Useful. And the rough places plain. But all that's geometry. But it measures the earth. You have to go slow to catch up. Eat to get thin? no, but fast to grow fat, that was a fine one. Then lose to win? fail to succeed? Risky. Stop to begin. The form made noiseless music--lumly lum lum or lum-lee-lee lum--like fill to empty, every physical extreme. Die to live was a bit old hat. But default to repay. And lie to be honest. He liked the ring of that. Flack! I'm white in order to be black. Sin first and saint later. Cruel to be kind, of course, and the hurts in the hurter--that's what they say--a lot of blap. That's my name, my nomination: Saint Later. Now then: humble to be proud; poor to be rich. Enslave to make free? That moved naturally. Also multiply to subtract. Dee dee dee. Young Saint Later. A list of them, as old as Pythagoras had. Even engenders odd. How would that be? Eight is five and three. There were no middle-aged saints--they were all old men or babies. Ah, god--the wise fool. The simpleton sublime. Babe in the woods, roach in the pudding, prince in the pauper, enchanted beauty in the toad. This was the wisdom of the folk and the philosopher alike--the disorder of the lyre, or the drawn-out bow of that sane madman, the holy Heraclitus. The poet Zeno. The logician Keats. Discovery after discovery: the more the mice eat, the fatter the cats. There were tears and laughter, for instance--how they shook and ran together into one gay grief. Dumb eloquence, swift still waters, shallow deeps. Let's see: impenitent remorse, careless anxiety, heedless worry, tense repose. So true of tigers. Then there was the friendly enmity of sun and snow, and the sweet disharmony of every union, the greasy mate of cock and cunt, the cosmic poles, war that's peace, the stumble that's an everlasting poise and balance, spring and fall, love, strife, health, disease, and the cold duplicity of Number One and all its warm divisions. The sameness that's in difference. The limit that's limitless. The permanence that's change. The distance of the near at home. So--to roam, stay home. Then pursue to be caught, submit to conquer. Method--ancient--of Chinese. To pacify, inflame. Love, hate. Kiss, kill. In, out, up, down, start, stop. Ah . . . from pleasure, pain. Like circumcision of the heart. Judgement and mercy. Sin and grace. It little mattered; everything seemed to Furber to be magically right, and his heart grew fat with satisfaction. Therefore there is good in every evil; one must lower away to raise; seek what's found to mourn its loss; conceive in stone and execute in water; turn profound and obvious, miraculous and commonplace, around; sin to save; destroy in order to create; live in the sun, though underground. Yes. Doubt in order to believe--that was an old one--for this the square IS in the circle. O Phaedo, Phaedo. O endless ending. Soul is immortal after all--at last it's proved. Between dead and living there's no difference but the one has whiter bones. Furber rose, the mosquitoes swarming around him, and ran inside.

The sixth aspect of the path is right effort. Wrong effort is struggle. We often approach a spiritual discipline as though we need to conquer our evil side and promote our good side. We are locked in combat with ourselves and try to obliterate the tiniest negative tendency. Right effort doesn't involve struggle at all. When we see things as they are, we can work with them, gently and without any kind of aggression whatsoever.

Do not let evil defeat you; instead, conquer evil with good.

Self-regulation is not a sign of weakness, it's a sign of strength. It doesn't take any character for the animal to be animal, but the true test of character is to behave human, upon conquering our inner animal.

The Reformation has changed the moral ideal, and elevated domestic and social life. The mediaeval ideal of piety is rhe flight from the evil world: the modern ideal is the transformation of the world. The model saint of the Roman Catholic is the monk separated from the enjoyments and duties of society...: the model of the saint of the Evangelical Church is the free Christian and useful citizen, who shows his piety in the performance of social and domestic duties, and aims at the sanctification of the ordinances of nature. The former tries to conquer the world by running away from its temptations -though after all he cannot escape the flesh, the world and the Devil in his own heart: the latter tries to conquer the world by converting it...The one flees from woman as a tempter: the other takes her into his heart, and reflects in the marriage relation the holy union of Christ with his Church. The one aims to secure chastity by abstinence: the other proves it in his family. The one renounces all earthly processions: the other uses them for the good of his fellow-men...The daily duties and trials of domestic and social life are a better school of moral discipline than monkish celibacy and poverty. Female virtues and graces are necessary to supplement and round out rhe character of man. Exceptions there are, but they prove the rule.

The Reformation has changed the moral ideal, and elevated domestic and social life. The mediaeval ideal of piety is the flight from the evil world: the modern ideal is the transformation of the world. The model saint of the Roman Catholic is the monk separated from the enjoyments and duties of society...: the model of the saint of the Evangelical Church is the free Christian and useful citizen, who shows his piety in the performance of social and domestic duties, and aims at the sanctification of the ordinances of nature. The former tries to conquer the world by running away from its temptations -though after all he cannot escape the flesh, the world and the Devil in his own heart: the latter tries to conquer the world by converting it...The one flees from woman as a tempter: the other takes her into his heart, and reflects in the marriage relation the holy union of Christ with his Church. The one aims to secure chastity by abstinence: the other proves it in his family. The one renounces all earthly processions: the other uses them for the good of his fellow-men...The daily duties and trials of domestic and social life are a better school of moral discipline than monkish celibacy and poverty. Female virtues and graces are necessary to supplement and round out the character of man. Exceptions there are, but they prove the rule.

The Reformation has changed the moral ideal, and elevated domestic and social life. The medieval ideal of piety is the flight from the evil world: the modern ideal is the transformation of the world. The model saint of the Roman Catholic is the monk separated from the enjoyments and duties of society...: the model of the saint of the Evangelical Church is the free Christian and useful citizen, who shows his piety in the performance of social and domestic duties, and aims at the sanctification of the ordinances of nature. The former tries to conquer the world by running away from its temptations -though after all he cannot escape the flesh, the world and the Devil in his own heart: the latter tries to conquer the world by converting it...The one flees from woman as a tempter: the other takes her into his heart, and reflects in the marriage relation the holy union of Christ with his Church. The one aims to secure chastity by abstinence: the other proves it in his family. The one renounces all earthly possessions: the other uses them for the good of his fellow-men...The daily duties and trials of domestic and social life are a better school of moral discipline than monkish celibacy and poverty. Female virtues and graces are necessary to supplement and round out the character of man. Exceptions there are, but they prove the rule.

Not a single nation,” he went on, as though reading it line by line, still gazing menacingly at Stavrogin, “not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason. There has never been an example of it, except for a brief moment, through folly. Socialism is from its very nature bound to be atheism, seeing that it has from the very first proclaimed that it is an atheistic organisation of society, and that it intends to establish itself exclusively on the elements of science and reason. Science and reason have, from the beginning of time, played a secondary and subordinate part in the life of nations; so it will be till the end of time. Nations are built up and moved by another force which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death. It’s the spirit of life, as the Scriptures call it, ‘the river of living water,’ the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse. It’s the æsthetic principle, as the philosophers call it, the ethical principle with which they identify it, ‘the seeking for God,’ as I call it more simply. The object of every national movement, in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true one. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never happened that all, or even many, peoples have had one common god, but each has always had its own. It’s a sign of the decay of nations when they begin to have gods in common. When gods begin to be common to several nations the gods are dying and the faith in them, together with the nations themselves. The stronger a people the more individual their God. There never has been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear. Reason has never had the power to define good and evil, or even to distinguish between good and evil, even approximately; on the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a disgraceful and pitiful way; science has even given the solution by the fist. This is particularly characteristic of the half-truths of science, the most terrible scourge of humanity, unknown till this century, and worse than plague, famine, or war. A half-truth is a despot … such as has never been in the world before. A despot that has its priests and its slaves, a despot to whom all do homage with love and superstition hitherto inconceivable, before which science itself trembles and cringes in a shameful way..." Stavrogin observed cautiously... "The very fact that you reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality …” “I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?” cried Shatov. “On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods. Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity. There is no going against facts. The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God. The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art. Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations.

Aidas was a Prince of Hel, Silene went on. Bryce’s breath caught in her throat. Using rare summoning salts that facilitated communication between worlds, his spies in Midgard had kept him well informed since the Asteri had failed to conquer his planet. Aidas had been assigned to hunt for the Asteri ever since. So their evil might never triumph again. On his world, or any other. Hel was somehow the force for good in all this.

The Blasphemy of Reason To understand the relationship between Islamic and scientific modes of thought, it's useful to contrast the emergence of Islam with that of Christianity. In its first four centuries, Christianity germinated gradually within the Roman Empire, with many of its leading theologians converting to the new religion only after having spent their formative years immersed in the classical learning of ancient Greece. Islam, by contrast, spread through military conquest, expanding mostly through conversion of conquered peoples. As a result, even when Muslim rulers welcomed classical Greek knowledge, it was perceived as something alien. Tellingly, Greek science and natural philosophy were known throughout Islam as the “foreign sciences,” in contrast to the “Islamic sciences,” such as the study of the Quran, which were considered to hold the highest place in Muslim life.9 In the early years of Islamic civilization, various groups vigorously competed for the hearts and minds of the Muslim community. Those who actively pursued the Greek classical tradition of knowledge were known as the faylasuf or “philosophers.” Another group, taking a more mystical approach to Islam, were the Sufis. However, the two principal groups that emerged were the Ash'arites, traditionalists who believed in the primacy of Islamic faith, and the Mu'tazilites, who believed in a rational explication of the Quran.10 The Mu'tazilites were devout followers of Islam, while applying rational thought to their interpretation of theology. When passages in the Quran referred to “the face of God” or described God sitting on his throne, the Mu'tazilites argued that these descriptions should be interpreted metaphorically. It seemed to them equally valid to use reason as theology to make important distinctions in their lives, such as between good and evil. The Ash'arites, on the other hand, based their viewpoint on the fundamental presumption that the Quran was the direct word of God transmitted through Muhammad. As such, they viewed the Quran as something eternal and uncreated, an indivisible part of God: it wasn't just the word of God; it literally was God. How, then, to interpret statements about God's face or God sitting on his throne? The Ash'arite position was to take these statements literally, and if reason were unable

Let love be without hypocrisy.a Detest evil;b cling to what is good. 10 Love one another deeply as brothers and sisters.a Take the lead in honoring one another.b 11 Do not lack diligence in zeal; be fervent in the Spirit;A, a serve the Lord.b 12 Rejoice in hope;a be patient in affliction;b be persistent in prayer.c 13 Share with the saints in their needs;a pursue hospitality.b 14 Bless those who persecute you;a bless and do not curse. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice;a weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another.a Do not be proud;b instead, associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own estimation.c 17 Do not repay anyone evil for evil.a Give careful thought to do what is honorableb in everyone’s eyes. 18 If possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.a 19 Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for God’s wrath, because it is written, Vengeance belongs to me; I will repay,a, b says the Lord. 20 But If your enemy is hungry, feed him.a If he is thirsty, give him something to drink. For in so doing you will be heaping fiery coals on his head.b, c 21 Do not be conquered by evil, but conquer evil with good.

Our side indeed. The side of people who want to see peace in the world, good overcome evil, kindness conquer hate. That is always a side, and it transcends nationality and everything else for that matter.

Writing in 1964, C. G. Jung accurately observed: Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this breakup in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.3 Once we accept that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, we can perhaps also see that we are coresponsible for our present situation. As Jung observed, we must see the shadow in our own psyche if we want to perceive reality clearly or, as the Buddhists put it, “see things as they really are.” We cannot become whole without this work on our shadow, the swampland consisting of all those aspects of our personality that we prefer to deny and instead project onto others: egotism, fantasy, greed, cowardice, laziness, irrationality, fanaticism, etc. To put it starkly: In order to become whole, we must discover the potential of terrorism in the complex circuitry of our own psyche. Terrorism is an expression of spiritual deafness, moral blindness, and irrational anger. Only when we can acknowledge the presence of these dark forces within us can we take responsibility for them. This brings me back to the mental discipline of Karma-Yoga by which action is transformed in such a way that it is not rooted in the shadow and therefore is not karmically tainted. Morally and spiritually sound action must be accompanied by self-observation, self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-transformation, and self-transcendence. Without these disciplines, we are likely to succumb to projection and wrong action (vikarma). These, in turn, are not conducive to inner and outer peace. On the contrary, if our behavior fails to be anchored in sound spiritual virtues and practices, it will predictably cause disturbance, disharmony, harm, hurt, and even chaos in the world. Krishna taught that there are circumstances when it is not only appropriate but essential to take a firm stand against evil. He was not a romantic pacifist who, in the interest of an abstract principle (however noble), allows evil to conquer good. When the moral or spiritual order is at stake, we must actively oppose the forces that seek to undermine it. He even condoned war to accomplish this end, though a war not tinged with hatred and conducted for selfish reasons.