Quotes About Morality

Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?

Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.

The esteem of wise and good men is the greatest of all temporal encouragements to virtue; and it is a mark of an abandoned spirit to have no regard to it.

Men have no right to what is not reasonable, and to what is not for their benefit.

Man is by his constitution a religious animal; atheism is against not only our reason, but our instincts.

Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and a series of unconnected arts. Though just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

For this world that men have made, none of us is bad enough. For the world that made us, none is good enough.

I'm a humanist; I'd rather kill a man than a snake.

The man that makes a character, makes foes.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God.

Man creates both his god and his devil in his own image. His god is himself at his best, and his devil himself at his worst.

Each man was his own executioner and his own victim.

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

I don't care if a man's theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

The guilty man may escape, but he cannot be sure of doing so.

How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?

Keep alive the light of justice, And much that men say in blame will pass you by.

The gifts of bad men bring no good with them.

The gift of a bad man can bring no good.

If vices were profitable, the virtuous man would be the sinner.

The inclination to goodness is imprinted deeply in the nature of man.