Quotes About Morality

And be on they guard against the good and the just They would fain curcify those who devise their own virtue -- they hate the lonesome ones.

Morality is the greatest of all tools for leading mankind by the nose.

That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Thinking evil is making evil.

What is done out of love is beyond Good and Evil

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

If nationalism is truly the hallmark of a people in the prime of its youth and energies, how does it happen that under its aegis morality decays, ancient customs die out—that men are uprooted, the steadfast derided, the thoughtful branded, the rivers poisoned, and the forests destroyed?

Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the source of self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure; the nexus of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom. He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be his act, but he cannot remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous.

Genuine morality is preserved only in the school of adversity; a state of continuous prosperity may easily prove a quick sand to virtue

A healthy nature needs no God or immortality

Nothing seems to me to be rarer today then genuine hypocrisy. I greatly suspect that this plant finds the mild atmosphere of our culture unendurable. Hypocrisy has its place in the ages of strong belief: in which even when one is compelled to exhibit a different belief one does not abandon the belief one already has.

Un animal noble ou une belle fleur sont « intellectuellement » supérieurs à un homme vil. Dieu se révèle à la plante sous la forme de la lumière solaire. La plante se tourne irrésistiblement vers la lumière; elle ne saurait être athée ou impie.

Do as well as you possibly can. That's Buddhist morality.

Because a lot of our philosophical stances these days are kind of half-assed. We're very bold in our proclamations of our own moral rectitude, but then we neglect to even keep our own toilets clean. You see a lot of that kind of thing. I used to see it all the time in my punk-rock days. Those guys were super-concerned with having the right political and philosophical views. But they never seemed to be able to keep their showers free from mold or

There is no ultimate arbiter of right or wrong. In the whole vast universe, there is nobody who knows what you should do in any given situation any better than you do — not your mom and dad, not your best friend Alice, not the president or the pope, and certainly not God.

Deferring to authority is nothing more than a cowardly shirking of personal responsibility. The more power you grant an authority figure the worse you can behave in his name. That's why people who take God as their ultimate authority are always capable of the worst humanity has to offer.

Buddhist morality includes everything we do. You can never know just how far-reaching the effects of your actions might be.

This is always and inevitably the case. No one gets away with murder. No one gets away with anything. You can't escape the consequences of your immoral acts any more than someone who drops a big-ass amp directly on his foot can escape having broken toe-bones. Your life and the life of everyone else in the universe are one seamless whole. To cause another living being pain isn't evil-it's just stupid. Because that being is you.

We're very bold in our proclamations of our own moral rectitude, but then we neglect to even keep our own toilets clean.

If it doesn't sound like "don't be a jerk" it's not Buddhist teaching.

Why would you clone people when you can go to bed with them and make a baby? C'mon, it's stupid.

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.

Style is the ultimate morality of mind." ... [It has] a double aim of complete fidelity to fact and to one's complex sense of fact. ... We are shooting at a star when we aim at style in this sense; we are trying to do justice at once to an infinity without and a near infinity within.

On the back of every right, there's a wrong looming.