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“Write it all down—the good, the bad, and the ugly.”
― Stephen King, If It Bleeds

“He had a beautiful thin build and a nice head of hair and very white teeth, and normally Louise thought him handsome. But the quickest way to make an attractive man ugly was to give him too much to drink. Drunk men frightened her. She had learned young how to coddle them, how to laugh just enough at their bad jokes to prevent them from feeling insulted, but not so much that her laughter egged them on. Coiled just below a surface of good humor lay their strength and their meanness, two guns waiting to go off.”
― Liz Moore, The God of the Woods

“Tom Bombadil is not an important person – to the narrative. I suppose he has some importance as a ‘comment’. I mean, I do not really write like that: he is just an invention (who first appeared in the Oxford Magazine about 1933), and he represents something that I feel important, though I would not be prepared to analyze the feeling precisely. I would not, however, have left him in, if he did not have some kind of function. I might put it this way. The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship, moderated freedom with consent against compulsion that has long lost any object save mere power, and so on; but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control, but if you have, as it were taken ‘a vow of poverty’, renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself, watching, observing, and to some extent knowing, then the question of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless. It is a natural pacifist view, which always arises in the mind when there is a war.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

“[89d] “The danger of becoming misologists or haters of argument,” said he, “as people become misanthropists or haters of man; for no worse evil can happen to a man than to hate argument. Misology and misanthropy arise from similar causes. For misanthropy arises from trusting someone implicitly without sufficient knowledge. You think the man is perfectly true and sound and trustworthy, and afterwards you find him base and false. Then you have the same experience with another person. By the time this has happened to a man a good many times, especially if it happens among those whom he might regard as his nearest [89e] and dearest friends, he ends by being in continual quarrels and by hating everybody and thinking there is nothing sound in anyone at all. Have you not noticed this?”

“Certainly,” said I.

“Well,” he went on, “is it not disgraceful, and is it not plain that such a man undertakes to consort with men when he has no knowledge of human nature? For if he had knowledge when he dealt with them, he would think that the good [90a] and the bad are both very few and those between the two are very many, for that is the case.”
“What do you mean?”

“I mean just what I might say about the large and small. Do you think there is anything more unusual than to find a very large or a very small man, or dog, or other creature, or again, one that is very quick or slow, very ugly or beautiful, very black or white? Have you not noticed that the extremes in all these instances are rare and few, and the examples between the extremes are very many?”

“To be sure,” said I.

“And don't you think,” [90b] said he, “that if there were to be a competition in rascality, those who excelled would be very few in that also?”

“Very likely,” I replied.

“Yes, very likely,” he said, “But it is not in that respect that arguments are like men; I was merely following your lead in discussing that. The similarity lies in this: when a man without proper knowledge concerning arguments has confidence in the truth of an argument and afterwards thinks that it is false, whether it really is so or not, and this happens again and again; then you know, those men especially who [90c] have spent their time in disputation come to believe that they are the wisest of men and that they alone have discovered that there is nothing sound or sure in anything, whether argument or anything else, but all things go up and down, like the tide in the Euripus, and nothing is stable for any length of time.”

“Certainly,” I said, “that is very true.”

“Then, Phaedo,” he said, “if there is any system of argument which is true and sure and can be learned, it would be a sad thing if a man, [90d] because he has met with some of those arguments which seem to be sometimes true and sometimes false, should then not blame himself or his own lack of skill, but should end, in his vexation, by throwing the blame gladly upon the arguments and should hate and revile them all the rest of his life, and be deprived of the truth and knowledge of reality”.”
― Plato, Phaedo

“Wasn't that the point? To make the most of what you have when you have it: the good and the bad. The beautiful and the ugly.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Fact was, she just wasn’t that same person anymore. Her remaining scar was a reminder of that, like an ex-smoker who kept a pack of cigarettes somewhere as proof she was stronger than that. It was a badge of honor and a marker place for where she was in her life right now. And as it turned out, memories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—really were what made a person.”
― Jill Shalvis, Playing for Keeps

“She was beautiful outside, but to be honest, she was ugly inside. I never saw her the same way. A bad attitude makes you unattractive. It overrides what’s outside. It’s important to look good and develop our talents, to get a good education, and to stay in shape, but it’s more important to keep a good attitude. Nobody wants to be around a sour, critical, condescending person.”
― Joel Osteen, Empty Out the Negative: Make Room for More Joy, Greater Confidence, and New Levels of Influence

“You don't like her. My mother don't like her. She's a dog, and I'm a fat, ugly little man. All I know is I had a good time last night. I'm gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I'm going down on my knees and beg that girl to marry me. It we make a party again this New Year's, I gotta date for the party. You don't like her, that's too bad. (He moves into the booth, sits, turns again to ANGIE, smiles.) When you gonna get married, Angie? You're thirty-four years old. All your kid brothers are married. You oughtta be ashamed of yourself.”
― Paddy Chayefsky, The Collected Works of Paddy Chayefsky: The Television Plays

“The movie always ends with the ‘I love you.’ He's holding the boombox outside of her room, and they ride off into the sunset. You never hear they broke up a week later when she wanted an East Coast school and he wanted West Coast. The thing that makes love lasting and true is knowing another person. You feel for them, but do you know them, the good, the bad, and the ugly, in your heart of hearts.

- Theo Jefferson from Smolder: A Strong Woman Firefighter Romance”
― Carina Alyce, Smolder

“The difference between a basic orientation toward the love of learning and one toward the love of spectacle is that between two kinds of basic restlessness. The one sort, exemplified by Augustine's own journey as he describes it, unceasingly moves past the surfaces of things to what is more real. The second flees unceasingly from object to object, all on the same level—never culminating in anything further, never achieving anything beyond the thrill of experience. It is the bare existence of a human possibility that inspires the exercise of the love of spectacle. The lovers of spectacle seek no good of the kind Malcolm X, André Weil, or Irina Ratushinskaya sought—indeed, it is the bad, the sad, and the ugly as such that hold special fascination for them. The love of learning always wants more; the love of spectacle is satisfied at the surface, like someone scratching an itch rather than trying to heal a wound.”
― Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life

“your ability to receive is essential to the success of your business. Receiving includes your ability to receive all the good things in life, and it goes far beyond that. It includes your ability to receive everything–the good, the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. You have to be willing to receive money and you have to be willing to receive no money. You have to be willing to receive admiration, appreciation and gifts. You have to be willing to receive information and other people’s”
― Simone Milasas, Joy of Business

“Why always bad people stay ahead of good? Because good people invariably cannot think that bad ones can be so bad! There is nothing wrong in thinking like bad to stay ahead of them and beat them on their own game.”
― Sandeep Sahajpal, The Twelfth Preamble: To all the authors to be!

“Feedback is the tonic of great champions; be humble to take the good, the bad, and the ugly of feedback.”
― Daniel ANIKOR, CATCH THEM YOUNG

“It was the way she carried herself, like she'd seen it all--the good, the bad, the downright ugly--and still believed in goodness.”
― Ana Huang, Twisted Love

“Goodness is not the opposite of that which is bad, goodness is totally unrelated to that which is ugly, evil, bad, to what is not beautiful. Goodness is by itself. If you say the good is the outcome of the bad, the evil, the ugly, then the good has in it the bad, the ugly, the brutal, so the good must be, and is, totally unrelated to that which is not good.”
― J. Krishnamurti, This Light in Oneself: True Meditation

“Like every reflection one might have when looking back on their high school years, they will see the things that they miss and the things that they wish they could go back and change. But, at the end of the day, I am thankful for the moments (the good, the bad, and even the ugly) that occurred during this time and the people I had known. All of these have made their contributions to the man I am today and that is all I can ask for. Though I am a nostalgic person, or else I wouldn’t have written this memoir, I take those experiences and use them to look ahead to the future.”
― Michael J. Mantsourani, Life is Staged: A Memoir on Finding Myself in High School Theater

“Self-love is about knowing everything about yourself, however ugly or dark or bad your truth is, and accepting yourself with it. Self-love is about knowing how to transform your flaws into your strengths rather than hiding them inside you so that no one can see them. Self-love is about choosing yourself every single day to study your patterns, examine your behavior, knowing your thoughts (even if they are mean at times). Self-love is about creating a home deep inside you where you can be YOU without worrying about healing, pretending, or perfectionism. You are beautiful with your dark side not by hiding them under the mask of goodness.”
― Renuka Gavrani

“He’d asked one of his employees, an Ecuadoran named José Maria, to go to town and buy him an iPod and load it up with a playlist he’d entitled “Ranch Music.” It consisted largely of film scores. Cuts from Ennio Morricone like “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” the theme from A Fistful of Dollars, “L’Estasi Dell’oro (The Ecstasy of Gold),” and “La Resa dei Conti (For a Few Dollars More),” Elmer Bernstein’s theme from The Magnificent Seven, “The Journey,” and “Calvera’s Return,” and Jerome Moross’ theme from The Big Country. Big, wonderful, rousing, swelling, sweeping, triumphalist music from another era. It was music that simply wasn’t made anymore. The pieces were about tough (but fair) men under big skies on horseback, their women waiting for them at home, and bad guys—usually Mexicans—to be vanquished. In”
― C.J. Box, Cold Wind

“The world is a mix of people some good, great and beautiful and some bad, worse and ugly.”
― Aiyaz Uddin