Spiritual Quote of the Day (Reinhold Niebuhr, on ‘The Children of Light’)

“The children of light must be armed with the wisdom of the children of darkness but remain free from their malice.” — American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense (1944)

Quote of the Day (John Steinbeck, on the ‘Net of Good and Evil’)

“I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?” —American novelist and Nobel Literature laureate John Steinbeck (1902-1968), East of Eden (1952)

Quote of the Day (Simone Weil, on Writers’ Moral Duties)

“Writers do not have to be professors of morals, but they do have to express the human condition. And nothing concerns human life so essentially, for every man at every moment, as good and evil. When literature becomes deliberately indifferent to the opposition of good and evil it betrays its function and forfeits all claims to excellence.”—Simone Weil, “The Responsibility of Writers,” in The Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (1977)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, on “The Line Dividing Good and Evil”)

"If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: an Experiment in Literary Investigation (1974)