Quotes About Morality

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.

Goodness is giving up power and acting upon the world negatively. The good are unimaginable.

How hardening to the heart it must be to do this thing: to change an innocent soaring being into a bundle of struggling rags and pain.

In a world without a redeemer only clarity was the answer to guilt. He would make it all clear to himself, shirking nothing, and then he would decide.

This is an age of demons and amoral angels and all sorts of deep fears, like the first centuries of the Christian era, it's an age of extreme solutions.

There are moments when, if one rejects the simple and obvious promptings of duty, one finds oneself in a labyrinth of complexities of some quite new kind.

La gente no suele saber aplicar la filosofía. Dudo de que ni siquiera los filósofos sepan hacerlo. —La gente puede usar conceptos morales lo mismo que tú has usado ahora el concepto de la verdad para convencerme. Cualquiera puede hacerlo. —Quizá. Pero creo que la filosofía moral es algo que resulta desesperanzadamente personal. No puede ser comunicado. «Si un león hablase, no podríamos comprenderlo», ha dicho Wittgenstein.

On this planet . . . many things are 'the rule' which are thoroughly evil and pernicious.

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

When the poor ghosts have gone, what remains are ordinary obligations and ordinary interests. One can live quietly and try to do tiny good things and harm no one.

Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.

I ceased some time ago to believe in goodness.

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

She must not be tempted by truthfulness, she must play the game out to the end.

How absolute the knave is!

One can't stop people from killing themselves if they're determined to. It may even be wrong to do so.

But thinking about wickedness usually just comforts.

Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.

The false god punishes, the true god slays.)

We must keep this love uncontaminated even if we kill it.

Moreover, and of course, she loved him; but in Sefton's stern code her love had always been chained up, and howled fruitlessly, as indeed it did now.

How can I even think of such a fate . . . Better to commit murder.

If Buddhists think evil is unreal they must be mad! Thinking evil is unreal is holding hands with evil under the table!

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.