Quotes About Morality

Vice is its own curse. If we let nature alone, she cures vice by the most frightful penalties.

that rights and duties should be in equilibrium. A

A monarchical or aristocratic system is not immoral, if the rights and duties of persons and classes are in equilibrium, although the rights and duties of different persons and classes are unequal. An

We are to choose affliction rather than sin, yea, the greatest affliction before the least sin. Moses

Conscience is God's sergeant he employs to arrest the sinner.

We are grown debauched in our judgments, and corrupt in our principles; no wonder then if carnal in our joys.

And so when thou art tempted to any sin, look not on it as a single sin, but as having all other sins in its belly.

But, as the father hath it, manducant in terris quod apud inferos digerunt—they devour on earth those morsels that will lie heavy on their stomachs in hell to be digesting to eternity.

Faith and a good conscience are hope's two wings.

A false heart yields when sin comes with a bribe in its hand.

That he who means to be a Christian indeed, must endeavour to maintain the power of holiness and righteousness in his life and conversation.

It is not a single cowardice that drives us into fiction's fantasies. We often fear that literature is a game we can't afford to play — the product of idleness and immoral ease. In the grip of that feeling it isn't life we pursue, but the point and purpose of life — its facility, its use.

If the relation of morality to art were based simply on the demand that art be concerned with values, then almost every author should satisfy it even if he wrote with his prick while asleep. (Puritans will object to the language in that sentence, and feminists to the organ, and neither will admire or even notice how it was phrased.)

Corruption, in these bugs, is splendid.

In the end, it comes down, as it always comes down, to each individual human being doing what he—or she—must to live with himself/herself.

really believed what he wrote in The Gulag Archipelago: "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties . . . but right through every human heart" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–56 [Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973]).

No man can follow Christ and go astray.

Where defining foreign policy as 'ethical' went wrong was that it implied that all decisions would be exclusive in every respect of any dealings with unethical regimes.

Three parts of the Noble Eightfold Path fall within the training of s?la: right speech, right action, and right livelihood.

The only vice which cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

It is remarkable how virtuous and generously disposed everyone is at a play. We uniformly applaud what is right and condemn what is wrong, when it costs us nothing but the sentiment.

A hypocrite despises those whom he deceives, but has no respect for himself. He would make a dupe of himself, too, if he could.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.