Quotes About Morality

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that man has two clues to the meaning of the universe. One is the knowledge of a law that he did not make but is obligated to keep; the other is the knowledge that he does not and cannot keep it.

We are passing through an eerie phase of history in which the things that everyone really knows are treated as unheard-of doctrines, a time in which the elements of common decency are themselves attacked as indecent. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. Although our civilization has passed through quite a few troughs of immorality, never before has vice held the high moral ground.

Only good was created. Every evil thing is a good thing ruined. There are no other ways to get an evil thing.

A prominent businessman once replied to a question: "If I had to name the one most important quality of a top manager, I would say, personal integrity.

Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

To many people today, however, rights are something to protect us against the demands of morality.

What your body does is unrelated to your heart. Don't believe it. The same survey reports that hooking up commonly takes place when both participants are drinking or drunk, and it's not hard to guess the reason why: After a certain amount of this, you may need to get drunk to go through with it.

Can I admit to myself that I know about, say, the goodness of love and the evil of murder, while not admitting to myself that I know about the goodness of God and the evil of refusing Him?

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

morality would be undermined without a belief in divine judgment, but

A secular person treats as the Highest Standard something that isn't the Highest Standard.

Or perhaps the syndrome we are witnessing is preemptive capitulation: If we reduce our conscience to rubble before the bad men get here, they will have nothing to destroy.

If he makes humanity God and yet cries out against God's inhumanity, it is clear who has really been accused.

Even in the West, moreover, although the ethical ideal has been absolute monogamy, the legal norm has been merely relative monogamy, which is also known as successive polygamy.

How conscience tells us that we ought to be fair, nobody knows. This we can say: we don't know it just from being told, we don't know it from the five senses, and we don't know it by inference from prior knowledge. We just know it. The knowledge is "underived.

Those who do not accept conscience as a teacher must face it as an accuser.

If it really were impossible to derive an ought from the is of the human design, then the practice of medicine would make no sense. Natural

Depraved conscience turns out to be as different from genuine ignorance as it is from honest recognition.

it is impossible to legislate without legislating morality. Try to think of a law that is not based on a moral idea; you won't be able to do it.

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

The goods of fidelity, for example, are plain and concrete to the man who has not strayed, but they are faint, like mathematical abstractions, to the one who is addicted to other men's wives.

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.

It is hard enough to face the moral law even with the revelation that the divine justice and divine mercy are conjoined. It offends our pride to be forgiven, terrifies it to surrender control.