Quotes About Morality

But you knew; you understood; you had felt the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by disloyalty and cruelty and indifference. That was what I'd never known before--and it's better than anything I've known.

The idea that reading is a moral quality has unhappily led many conscientious persons to renounce their innocuous dalliance with light literature for more strenuous intercourse. These are the persons who make it a rule to read.

a certain measure of contempt was attached to men who continued their philandering after marriage. In the rotation of crops there was a recognised season for wild oats; but they were not to be sown more than once.

The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied.

Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.

she likes being good, and I like being happy.

Oh, Gerty, I wasn't meant to be good.

Brains & culture seem non-existent from one end of the social scale to the other, & half the morons yell for filth, & the other half continue to put pants on the piano-legs.

But we're so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy. And

when ''such things happened'' it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman.

name's Regina Dallas,' I said, 'It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.' '' So

Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad

She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause

Edith Wharton

Beaufort was vulgar, he was uneducated, he was purse-proud; but the circumstances of his life, and a certain native shrewdness, made him better worth talking to than many men, morally and socially his betters, whose horizon was bounded by the Battery and the Central Park.

Even when it's the other way round it ain't always so easy to decide how far that kind of thing's binding… and they say shipwrecked fellows'll make a meal of friend as quick as they would of a total stranger.

It must be less wicked to love the wrong person than not to love anybody at all.

half the opprobrium of such an act lies in the name attached to it. Call it blackmail and it becomes unthinkable; but explain that it injures no one, and that the rights regained by it were unjustly forfeited, and he must be a formalist indeed who can find no plea in its defence.

THE TOUCHSTONE

If love as a sentiment was the discovery of the medieval poets, love as a moral emotion might be called that of the eighteenth-century philosophers, who, for all their celebration of free unions and fatal passions, were really on the side of the angels, were fighting the battle of the spiritual against the sensual, of conscience against appetite.

It was horrible of a young girl to let herself be talked about; however unfounded the charges against her, she must be to blame for their having been made.

All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches.

The only thing necessary for the continuance of evil is for a good man to do nothing.

A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.