Love Quote by Henry Van Dyke

Van Dyke builds a moral system out of something most people treat as entertainment: other people’s flaws. The line’s first move is practical, almost journalistic: don’t “believe anything bad” unless you “positively know it to be true.” That word choice matters. “Positively” isn’t a casual hedge; it’s a demand for proof, a rebuke to rumor culture before we had a name for it. He’s not warning against evil so much as against the lazy pleasures of suspicion.

Then he tightens the screws. Even if the negative thing is true, don’t “tell even that” unless it’s “absolutely necessary.” Truth doesn’t automatically earn the right to be repeated. Subtext: gossip often hides behind correctness, using facts as a permission slip for cruelty. Van Dyke splits ethics into two gates - epistemic (is it true?) and moral (is it needed?) - and insists you pass both.

The last clause is the clincher: “and that God is listening.” It’s not pious decoration; it’s a surveillance device for the conscience. By moving the audience from the social world to the divine ear, he shifts the incentive structure. You’re no longer managing your reputation among peers; you’re accountable to an omniscient witness who can’t be impressed by clever phrasing or “just being honest.”

Context helps: a late-19th/early-20th-century Protestant moral imagination, where character is forged in private disciplines and public speech is a moral act. Read now, it lands as an anti-algorithm manifesto: don’t amplify harm because it’s plausible, printable, or shareable.