Quotes About Morality

Like all other joys, she rejected it as sin.

Might and wrong combined, like iron magnetized, are endowed with irresistible attraction.

The wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.

A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.

Honesty and wisdom are such a delightful pastime, at another person's expense!

O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?—such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!

The shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth.

He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart.

Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's? Or

evil is the nature of mankind.

She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be for good.

Siate sinceri! Siate sempre sinceri! E mostrate francamente al mondo, se non proprio il vostro lato peggiore, almeno qualche aspetto, da cui possa essere noto il peggiore male che è in voi.

The besetting sin of a philanthropist, it appears to me, is apt to be a moral obliquity. His sense of honor ceases to be the sense of other honorable men. At some point of his course—I know not exactly when or where—he is tempted to palter with the right, and can scarcely forbear persuading himself that the importance of his public ends renders it allowable to throw aside his private conscience.

I will not speak! answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognized. And my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly one!

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity. The

to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man's own righteousness.

Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman's frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast-- at her, the child of honorable parents--at her, who had once been innocent---as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.

Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

La s?n?tatea moral? È™i intelectual? a unui om contribuie mult leg?turile de camaraderie cu oameni deosebiÈ›i de el, pe care nu-i prea intereseaz? È›elurile lui È™i care îl oblig? s? fac? un efort mintal pentru a le aprecia aptitudinile È™i sfera de preocup?ri.

The weaknesses and defects, the bad passions, the mean tendencies, and the moral diseases which lead to crime are handed down from one generation to another, by a far surer process of transmission than human law has been able to establish in respect to the riches and honors which it seeks to entail upon posterity.

It was strange to see that the good shrank not from the wicked, nor were the sinners abashed by the saints.