Quotes About Morality

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.

he makes a vast contrast between nature, which is this elemental, capricious, perhaps causal, perhaps chance-directed entity, and man, who has morality, who distinguishes between desire and will, duty and interest, the right and the wrong, and acts accordingly, if need be against nature.

Creer en el determinismo entrañaría una aterradora pérdida de los conceptos con que discutimos la moral, por ejemplo, el elogio, la censura, el lamento o el perdón.

For Rousseau), the ancient conflict (between liberty and authority) is to be resolved by breeding a race of men who will choose absolutely freely only that which is absolutely right.... there would be no conflict, no agony, no choice.

Science cannot destroy the consciousness of freedom, without which there is no morality and no art, but it can refute it.

I can see how, with enough false education, enough widespread illusion and error, men can, while remaining men, believe this and commit the most unspeakable crimes.

If in the revealing light of some moment of cataclysm you were to meet your double, not dressed in its worldly glad-rags, not armed with that buckler of excuses which conventional hypocrisy uses to cover our secret wishes, but in all its moral nakedness, showing its tendencies and urges, its pitiless cunning and its cowardice, are you certain that you would recognize it?

I was suddenly stricken with a feeling of black despair, hopelessly muddled by what was right and wrong. Nothing seemed clear cut; we did evil in the name of good, and good was done in the name of evil. [Chapter 27, page 306]

Only humans think death is evil. But it is nature. Evil exist's only in life. There is much good and evil alloted to each life.

It was the principle of this Court that deterrent laws, however strict, are useless without positive moral discipline; that the happiness of citizens depends, not on having the walls of their porticoes covered with laws, but on having justice in their hearts.

Their successors, instead of ruling for the good of their subjects, tyrannize for their own; and they met with the fate of tyrants. No person not reckless of the past could wish to imitate them. The earlier and the later experiences of Athens prove, in fact, two things: that Attica produces good men, and that empire spoils them.

Selfishness is the only real atheism; unselfishness the only real religion.

The wise and sagacious men of ancient times had the very spirit of the martial and did not kill.

Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another.

You're the absolute protagonist of this book, very well; but do you believe that gives you the right to have carnal relations with all the female characters?

sólo intentaba hacer bien lo que le parecía bien hacer,

only by having a clear idea what virtue is can I practice evil with a light heart.

Avete paura che le nostre anime caschino in mano al Diavolo? Avrebbero chiesto quelli della città -No: che non abbiate anima da dargli.

È dell'uomo attendere. Dell'uomo giusto, attendere con fiducia; dell'ingiusto, con paura.

Hai paura che le nostre anime caschino nelle mani del Diavolo? - avrebbero chiesto quelli della Città. - No: che non abbiate anima da dargli.

Thus the days went by at Terralba, and our sensibilities became numbed, as we felt ourselves lost between an evil and a virtue equally inhuman.

When you kill, you always kill the wrong man.

a preached immorality is more to be punished than an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness.

For men, evil is an act one can undo. But for women, evil is in their very being.