Quotes About Virtue

Ethical laws cannot be thought of as emanating originally merely from the will of this superior being as statutes, which, had he not first commanded them, would perhaps not be binding, for then they would not be ethical laws and the duty proper to them would not be the free duty of virtue but the coercive duty of law.

All so-called moral interest consists simply in respect for the law.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

To behold virtue in her proper form is nothing else but to contemplate morality stripped of all admixture of sensible things and of every spurious ornament of reward or self-love. How much she then eclipses everything else that appears charming to the affections, every one may readily perceive with the least exertion of his reason, if it be not wholly spoiled for abstraction.

the doctrine of morals is an autonomy of practical reason, while the doctrine of virtue is at the same time an autocracy of practical reason.

The sight of a being who is not adorned with a single feature of a pure and good will, enjoying unbroken prosperity, can never give pleasure to an impartial rational spectator. Thus a good will appears to constitute the indispensable condition even of being worthy of happiness.

Het is geheel en al onmogelijk om in de wereld en zelfs ook daarbuiten iets te bedenken wat zonder restrictie voor goed gehouden kan worden, behalve dan een GOEDE WIL.

Blind commitment to a theory is not an intellectual virtue: it is an intellectual crime.

Every human soul has seen, perhaps before their birth pure forms such as justice, temperance, beauty and all the great moral qualities which we hold in honour. We are moved towards what is good by the faint memory of these forms simple and calm and blessed which we saw once in a pure, clear light being pure ourselves.

You imagine that to live in a state of extremity is necessarily to discover the truth about yourself. What you discover then is violence and emptiness. And of this you make a virtue.

He had lived a chaste life really. It was his accusers and not his crimes which troubled him.

This is the fundamental wisdom that suffuses Iris Murdoch's fiction from Under the Net onward. True virtue, true goodness, true love flow from respect for the strangeness and the mystery of other people and the world that surrounds us. They flow from the refusal to inflict our own designs on them, to deny their innate elusiveness, their impenetrable quiddity.

I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after;

To be good is just never to lose it. How does evil begin in a life? How can it begin? Yet we were there once.

There may be no God, but there's decency and - and there's truth and trying to stay there, I mean to stay in it, in its sort of light, and trying to do a good thing and to hold onto what you know to be a good thing even if it seems stupid when you come to do it.

Society conspires to make a newly wed couple feel virtuous. Marriage is a symbol of goodness, though it is only a symbol.

Meaning well is a poor defense

I'm being accused of modesty, a horrible and thoroughly unnatural crime.

There is a longing for a supposedly simple and virtuous past that is almost universal among the people of a complex and vicious society.

Surely it is better that the immoral learn morality through adversity than that the moral forget morality in prosperity.

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right.

Nunca permitas que el sentido de la moral te impida hacer lo que está bien!

Você sabe que o pudor é somente o outro lado da lascívia.