Quotes About Morality

Money, in itself, is evil. And therefore he who gives money gives evil.

If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,

If everybody fought for nothing but his own convictions, there wouldn't be any wars,

If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness. If it has a consequence, a reward, it is also not goodness. Therefore, goodness is beyond the chain of cause and effect. It is exactly this that I know and that we all know. What greater miracle could there be than that?

How can one feel well when one is suffering in moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?

Why did millions of people kill one another when it has been known since the world began that it is physically and morally bad to do so? Because it was such an inevitable necessity that in doing it men fulfilled the elemental zoological law which bees fulfill when they kill one another in autumn, and which causes male animals to destroy one another. One can give no other reply to that terrible question.

His life meanwhile continued as before, with the same infatuations and dissipations. He liked to dine and drink well, and though he considered it immoral and humiliating could not resist the temptations of the bachelor circles in which he moved.

The man who is at a lower level but is moving onward toward perfection is living a more moral, a better life, is more fully carrying out Christ's teaching, than the man on a much higher level of morality who is not moving onward toward perfection.

Levin felt that in his soul, in the very bottom of his soul, his brother Nikolai, despite the ugliness of his life, was not more in the wrong than those who despised him.

an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature. Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed them did not at the time regard as being crimes.

Everything is indefinite, misty, and transient; only virtue is clear, and it cannot be destroyed by any force. —MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

Out of all the vices, the most difficult is ingratitude.

in every man, there were two beings: one the spiritual, seeking only that kind of happiness for him self which should tend towards the happiness of all; the other, the animal man, seeking only his own happiness, and ready to sacrifice to it the happiness of the rest of the world.

I would not take a young man to a lock-hospital to knock the hankering after women out of him, but into my soul to see the devils that were rending it.

For a long time afterwards, in prison, when moral change took place in me, I thought of that moment, recalled what I could of it, and considered it. I remembered for an instant, before the action I had a terrible consciousness I was killing a defenseless woman, my wife!

They meet, as we shall meet tomorrow, to murder one another; they kill and maim tens of thousands, and then have thanksgiving services for having killed so many people (they even exaggerate the number), and they announce a victory, supposing that the more people they have killed the greater their achievement. How does God above look at them and hear them?' exclaimed Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice.

Stop robbing others before you give money to beggars. With the same hand that we rob one person, we reward another, giving to the poor the money which we have taken from the even poorer. Better no charity than this kind of charity.

The same is true of the rich and the lazy. If they do not work but rely on the labor of others, they cannot be good either, no matter how much they pray or sacrifice.

Every kind thing is a virtue. To give water to a thirsty person, or to pick up a stone from a road, or to convince your neighbors and friends that they should be virtuous, or to show a traveler his way, or to smile looking into your neighbor's face—all this is virtue. —MOHAMMED

Submission to the law created by men makes one a slave; obedience to the law created by God makes one free.

But instead of all that, here he was—the rich husband of an unfaithful wife, a retired gentleman-in-waiting, who liked to eat, drink, and, unbuttoning himself, to denounce the government a little, a member of the Moscow English Club, and a universally beloved member of Moscow society.

One man may not kill. If he kills a fellow-creature, he is a murderer. If two, ten, a hundred men do so, they, too, are murderers. But a government or a nation may kill as many men as it chooses, and that will not be murder, but a great and noble action.

The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a married woman: 'Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut'.{1}

Yashvin, a gambler and a rake, a man not merely without moral principles, but of immoral principles, Yashvin was Vronsky's greatest friend in the regiment.