Quotes About Morality

It is warm, I am alive, I am calm and sad, I hardly know why. In this existence so even, so tranquil, and so gentle as I have here, I am in an element that weakens me morally while strengthening me physically; and I fall into melancholies of honey and roses which are none the less melancholy. It seems to me that all those I love forget me, and that it is justice, because I live a selfish life having nothing to do for any one of them.

It is a revenge the devil sometimes takes upon the virtuous, that he entraps them by the force of the very passion they have suppressed and think themselves superior to.

Oaths are the fossils of piety.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

A man is morally free when, in full possession of his living humanity, he judges the world, and judges other men, with uncompromising sincerity.

I stand in philosophy exactly where I stand in daily life; I should not be honest otherwise.

Un om este liber din punct de vedere moral când [...] judec? lumea ÅŸi îi judec? pe ceilalÅ£i oameni cu o sinceritate care nu face compromisuri.

The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are not debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we feel; and it can neither be correct nor incorrect that we feel them.

Do not have evil-doers for friends, do not have low people for friends : have virtuous people for friends, have for friends the best of men.

The brute necessity of believing something so long as life lasts does not justify any belief in particular.

Our virtues and vices couple with one another, and get children that resemble both their parents.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

We know now that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

The capacity for imaginative reflex, for moral risk in any human being is not limitless; on the contrary, it can be rapidly absorbed by fictions, and thus the cry in the poem may come to sound louder, more urgent, more real than the cry in the street outside. The death in the novel may move us more potently than the death in the next room. Thus there may be a covert, betraying link between the cultivation of aesthetic response and the potential of personal inhumanity.

Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time everywhere

Destroying human life in the hopes of saving human life is not ethical...

The best ethics course is to handcuff one of the bastards.

Few people have the virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

It is impossible to rightly govern a nation without God and the Bible.

Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation for it is better to be alone than in bad company.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.