Quotes About Morality

An impersonal and scientific knowledge of the structure of our bodies is the surest safeguard against prurient curiosity and lascivious gloating.

The essential thing is not knowledge, but character.

The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.

No he querido saber, pero he sabido que una de las niñas, cuando ya no era niña y no hacía mucho que había regresado de su viaje de bodas, entró en el cuarto de baño, se puso frente al espejo, se abrió la blusa, se quitó el sostén y se buscó el corazón con la punta de la pistola de su propio padre [...]

Hay algo vil, hay algo sucio en hacerse pasar por quien no se es, en conducirse taimadamente, en ganarse la confianza de otro tan sólo para traicionarla, aunque ese otro sea un malvado, un enemigo, un asesino.

El corazón de los hombres, al contrario que su piel, no tiene diferentes colores. O tiene grandeza o no la tiene, nada más

la línea divisoria entre la barbarie y la civilización nunca es una frontera geográfica entre diferentes países, sino una frontera moral dentro de cada pueblo; es más, dentro de cada individuo».

Action itself, so long as I am convinced that it is right action, gives me satisfaction.

Whatever gods there be, there is something godlike in man, as there is also something of the devil in him.

Benjamin Franklin wrote: "Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."40

In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good vs. evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good vs. doing nothing. -Deirdre Sullivan

The options given to them are the same options that one faces now. They reflect two distinct moralities, two antithetical religions, and two discrete manners of life. The one says: "I shall live according to feeling"; the other: "I shall live as God says.

If Freudianism is true, the most immoral people, or at best the most amoral people, should be the healthiest, whereas in fact the opposite is true. People in mental institutions and people who come to counseling invariably are people with great moral difficulties.

I wished I'd thought of that last before I'd departed. It might have been good advice to give out in my final days in Copper Downs, had I been able to fit such a conversation in between my busy schedule of murder, arson, and funerary rites.

We each carry a measure of grace, and we each carry a measure of evil. There is never enough grace to banish the evil, and there is never enough evil to smother the grace.

If God doesn't destroy Hollywood Boulevard, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.

But not for Jefferson. "I view cities as pestilent to the morals, the health, and the liberation of man

On the matter of slavery, he reproached but absolved the South of the ultimate blame: "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be judged.

The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language.

It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.

Saintliness is also a temptation.

What will my happiness be like? What kind of happy woman will Antigone grow into? What base things will she have to do, day after day, in order to snatch her own little scrap of happiness? Tell me – who will she have to lie to? Smile at? Sell herself to? Who will she have to avert her eyes from, and leave to die?

Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.

Just punishment, which observes restraints, is different from revenge, which knows no limits.