Quotes About Morality

Those of us who have the nerve to call ourselves Christians," W. H. Auden said in a sermon, "will do well to be extremely reticent on the subject. Indeed it is almost the definition of a Christian that he is somebody who knows he isn't one, either in faith or morals.

This means that, bad though it is and dangerous though its slipway may prove, there is a sense in which hypocrisy may be preferable to wickedness. Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.

Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

Living itself is the source of sin.

Victims. Victims of a transitional period of morality. That is what we both certainly are.

God, I ask you. Is trustfulness a sin?

Humanity? Don't be silly. I know. It is knocking down your fellow-men for the sake of your own happiness.

Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they're all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?

Scoundrels [...] simply don't die. The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people. [...] Scoundrels live a long time. The beautiful die young.

During the course of my life I have wished innumerable times that I might meet with a violent death, but I have never once desired to kill anybody. I thought that in killing a dreaded adversary I might actually be bringing him happiness.

A science which is postulated on the assumption that human beings are avaricious through all eternity is utterly devoid of point (whether in problems of distribution or any other aspect) to a person who is not avaricious.

Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue

When I looked up 'rococo' in the dictionary a while back it was defined as 'an ornamental style emphasizing the florid and the gorgeous, but lacking substance', and I couldn't help but laugh. It was so perfect. How could anything beautiful have 'substance' anyway? Pure beauty is always without meaning or morality.

A life free of lies! Ah, but that, too, was, by definition, a lie. Surely a lie already dwelled in the heart of anyone who sought to make such distinctions and stand in judgment.

Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.

What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought.

I find it difficult to understand the kind of human being who lives, or who is sure he can live, purely, happily, serenely while engaged in deceit.

Kurbanlar. gerçek bir ahlak döneminin kurbanlar?. Asl?nda her ikimiz de buyuz. Bir yerlerde devrim patlak verecek: Ama eski ahlak ölçüsü yolumuzu t?kayarak yeryüzünde de?i?mez biçimde duracak. Oysa denizde ne dalgalar patlar. Devrime kat?lmadan dipteki sular sakin, uyan?k ama uyu?mu? gibi durur.

There's nothing wrong in being a monster, is there? As long as we can stay alive?

En verdad que entre la Inocencia y el Mal no hay mayor separación que el grosor de una hoja de papel.

O quizá lo que llamamos el Mal sea, en su origen, la Estupidez.

Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

He'll be back soon," she said, her face grave. It suddenly occurred to me that what people call "honesty" might well refer to just such an expression. I wondered if what the word originally meant was not something lovable like that expression, rather than the stern virtue smelling of textbooks of morality.

Crime and Punishment. Dostoievski. These words grazed over a corner of my mind, startling me. Just supposing Dostoievski ranged 'crime' and 'punishment' side by side not as synonyms but as antonyms. Crime and punishment-- absolutely incompatible ideas, irreconcilable as oil and water. I felt I was beginning to understand what lay at the bottom of the scum-covered, turbid pond, that chaos of Dostoievski's mind--no, I still didn't quite see...