Quotes About Morality

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. Indeed

Nothing less than a persuasion of universal depravity can lock up the charity of a good man; and this persuasion must lead him, I think, either into atheism, or enthusiasm;

a proof that good books, no more than good men, do always survive the bad.

The elegant Lord Shaftesbury somewhere objects to telling too much truth: by which it may be fairly inferred, that, in some cases, to lie is not only excusable but commendable. And

Money is the fruit of evil as often as the root of it.

Conscience - the only incorruptible thing about us

La política que propugne dependerá de la postura particular que se adopte en cada momento. Porque cada cual es unas veces el Dr. Jekyll y otras Mr. Hyde.

do you think it is better to be clever than to be good?" "Good for what?" asked the Doctor. "You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

We trust to novels to train us in the practice of great indignations and great generositie.

Wherever you go, madam, it will matter little what you carry. You will always carry your goodness.

He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.

It was the tragic part of happiness; one's right was always made of the wrong of some one else.

Don't question your conscience so much--it will get out of tune like a strummed piano. Keep it for great occasions.

He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.

the high brutality of good intentions ...

When I'm bad I am bad !

I know at least what I am,' he simply went on; 'the other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifying--I believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you again and again--in fact you've admitted to me as much--that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.

Whether or no being hopelessly vulgar is being 'bad' is a question for the metaphysicians.

It is very wrong to make love to a woman who is engaged, but it is very wrong not to make love to a woman who is married.

But for a nice girl you do attract the most unnatural people.

grave inconvenience, they would incur. This would give a sense--which the spirit required, rather ached and sighed in the absence of--that somebody was paying something somewhere and somehow, that they were at least not all floating together on the silver stream of impunity.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Previously, when I began to write this tale, I set out by saying that Mlle. Claude was a whore. She is a whore, of course, and I'm not trying to deny it, but what I say now is--if Mlle. Claude is a whore then what name shall I find for the other women I know?

Estoy muerto espiritualmente. Físicamente, estoy vivo. Moralmente, soy libre.