Quotes About Morality

The people I grew up around, almost all of them had been born and raised in the South. And, you know, they didn't always go to church, but they lived their lives as if God were watching everything they did.

American society is still puritanical.

Very ancient parts of the brain are involved in moral decision making.

You can do more good by being good than any other way.

We can do more good by being good, than in any other way.

Being somebody who wants to be religious doesn't make me perfect and doesn't make me necessarily any better than anybody else. It maybe makes me better than I would have been if I didn't have that level.

What's appropriate in America anymore?

If you disapprove of violence, then you can't think there is any age when violence is appropriate.

If it doesn't seem nice, appropriate, or right, don't do it.

My children feel proud of me. Since their father is honest, they have nothing to be ashamed about.

Doing his own benefactions without hope of a celestial harvest, he thought himself on a nobler plane than religious men whom he always accused for making, as he called it, terms with God.

Güte ist nicht ohne Klippen: man schreibt sie dem Charakter zu und erkennt die stille Bemühung einer schönen Seele nur selten an. Die Bösen dagegen belohnt man für das Böse, das sie nicht tun.

Struck by the deep injustice, which is the end of these contests, in which everything is against the honest man, everything to the advantage of the rogue, he often summed up in favor of equity against law in such cases as bore on questions of what may be termed divination.

At the same time the wretched rooms rose before him, denuded of the poetry of love which beautifies everything; he saw them dirty and faded, regarding them as emblematic of an inner life devoid of honor, idle and vicious. Are not our feelings written, as it were, on the things about us?

Well, then! there are streets, or ends of streets, there are houses, unknown for the most part to persons of social distinction, to which a woman of that class cannot go without causing cruel and very wounding things to be thought of her. Whether the woman be rich and has a carriage, whether she is on foot, or is disguised, if she enters one of these Parisian defiles at any hour of the day, she compromises her reputation as a virtuous woman.

Virtue, socially speaking, is the companion of a comfortable life, and comes only with education.

Beaucoup de gens aiment mieux nier les dénouements, que de mesurer la force des liens, des noeuds, des attaches qui soudent secrètement un fait à un autre dans l'ordre moral.

Cuando la doctrina del ¿Que pagas? reemplace al ¿Que piensas? y pase a ser patrimonio del pueblo. ¿Que sera del país? pag179

But if the woman is young and pretty, if she enters a house in one of those streets, if the house has a long, dark, damp, and evil-smelling passage-way, at the end of which flickers the pallid gleam of an oil lamp, and if beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough.

In short, your good points will become your faults, your faults will be vices, and your virtues crime.

Il avait vu les trois grandes expressions de la société : l'obéissance, la Lutte et la Révolte; la Famille, le Monde et Vautrin. Et il n'osait prendre parti. L'Obéissance était ennuyeuse, la Révolte impossible, et la Lutte incertaine. Sa

Physical pain pales beside moral suffering, but arouses more pity since it can be seen.

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait. The secret of a great fortune made without apparent cause is soon forgotten, if the crime is committed in a respectable way.

an honest man is the man who keeps his own counsel, and will not divide the plunder.