Quotes About Morality

Happiness is a moral obligation

What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy.

Living well and beautifully and justly are all one thing.

Happiness is inseparably connected with decent, clean behavior.

To call a thing good not a day longer than it appears to us good, and above all not a day earlier - that is the only way to keep joy pure.

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness, and judgmental happiness.

Religious belief is not a precondition either of ethical conduct or of happiness.

Sin can bring pleasure, but never happiness.

Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the intelligible consequence of it.

The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.

Happiness comes from theperfect practice of virtue.

May your mind be thoroughly impressed with the absolute necessity of universal virtue and goodness, as the only sure road to happiness, and may you walk therein with undeviating steps.

Make us happy and you make us good.

The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

Count all th' advantage prosperous Vice attains, 'Tis but what Virtue flies from and disdains: And grant the bad what happiness they would, One they must want--which is, to pass for good.

No one praises happiness as one praises justice, but we call it a 'blessing,' deeming it something higher and more divine than things we praise.

Coarse rice to eat, water to drink, my bended arm for a pillow - therein is happiness. Wealth and rank attained through immoral means are nothing but drifting clouds.

There must be some mixture of happiness in everything but sin.

He who is good is happy.

It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.

One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happinesss, will not find happiness hereafter.