Quotes About Morality

A beauty to tempt away a man's better angel, corrupting his saint to be a very devil.

And to this I add: there is no divine intervention. There is no divine judge. So we must supply for ourselves notions of good and ill. This is the purview and millstone of the philosophe.

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it! That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.

If our love is a sin, then heaven must be full of such tender and selfless sinning as ours.

With you it is always the law, never equity.

End justifies the means

I can explain why I have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What's bad is bad even if necessary.

In treacherous currents, she is kept steady by a moral anchor the size of a ship.

Now, sprawled comfortably in his motel bed, Anson Sharp enjoyed the sleep of the amoral, which is far deeper and more restful than the sleep of the just, the righteous, and the innocent.

Nobody's inherently bad, said Annamaria. It's all about the choices we make. And the Deceiver, said Blossom, is always there to whisper the wrong choice in your ear. But I believe remorse can lead to redemption.

Sully disapproved of destruction for destruction's sake, which seemed ever more popular in the modern world, but he always took delight in burning out or otherwise eliminating Evil when Evil just couldn't keep its ugly head down and stay in the shadows, when it came right at you with all teeth bared. The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.

Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard.

All will be well, if we do what is right

There is no fate, only free will, and we were just in the way of other people's free will when they decided to do the Devil's work.

The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.

The why of the mind's existence and the how of its profound capacity to reason - especially its penchant for moral reasoning - will by their very nature remain as mysterious as whatever lies outside of time.

To do...what you feel sure is right and in the aid of justice, you sometimes have to do things that...make you wonder if in fact you are the good man that you like to believe you are.

You're a murderer.' 'So are you' she said. 'No, I kill. You murder.' 'What's the difference?' 'I kill murderers.

I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather...the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it-very loose, the line of the law-so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are always-short of the blantant theft or cold-blooded murder-safely on the right side.

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

She is awesomely competent without being smug. She is determined without being bossy, morally certain without being judgmental. She likes herself but is not full of herself.

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

Why aren't we designed to be unable to harm one another? Why aren't our brains wired so that we can't kill or rape or steal or lie or deceive? Why are we formed with the capacity to hate and envy?