Quotes About Morality

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison . . . the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something.

The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.

The world is] a wonderful place to live and lots more wonderful if you live in such a way that you can live with yourself.

Jane looked up at him. He was not an ugly man, not mean or hateful-looking. But you couldn't go by appearances. Some of the nicest-looking people were really very bad.

Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to heaven.

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good.

We are as liable to be corrupted by books as we are by companions.

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.

Let no man be sorry he has done good, because others have done evil.

The worst of men generally have the words rogue and villain most in their mouths, as the lowest of all wretches are the aptest to cry out low in the pit.

It is not enough that your designs, nay that your actions, are intrinsically good, you must take care they shall appear so.

Your religion...serves you only for an excuse for your faults, but is no incentive to your virtue.

a good conscience is never lawless in the worst regulated state, and will provide those laws for itself, which the neglect of legislators hath forgotten to supply.

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty.

The genius of the United States of America is Christian in the broadest sense, and its destiny is to remain Christian. This carries no sectarian meaning with it, but relates to a basic principle which differs from other principles in that it provides for liberty with morality, and pledges society to a code of relations based on fundamental Christian conceptions of human rights and duties.

A man who is good from docility, and not from stern self-control, has no character.

A person's conscience will object and accuse when an action may be harmful to themselves and others.

There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth… than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.