Quotes About Morality

No es suficiente enseñar a los hombres una especialidad. Con ello se convierten en máquinas utilizables pero no en individuos válidos. Tiene que recibir un sentimiento vivo de lo bello y lo moralmente bueno. En caso contrario se parece más a un perro bien amaestrado que a un entre armónicamente desarrollado.

The example of great and pure individuals is the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds.

Vivisezione. Nessuno scopo è così alto da giustificare metodi così indegni.

in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people

Los sistemas autocráticos y opresivos degeneran muy pronto. Pues la violencia atrae a individuos de escasa moral y es ley de vida que a tiranos geniales sucedan verdaderos canallas.

the only thing that can lead us to noble thoughts and deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and irresistibly invites abuse. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie?

You are still a person who completed a perfect project, but never a good person for doing so." "How, then, do I become an incompetent or bad person?" "You don't! When you do incompetent or evil acts, you become a person who acted badly—never a bad person.

She must, above all things, be just, not truckling to the strong and warring on or plundering the weak; she must act on the square with all nations, and the feeblest tribes; always keeping her faith, honest in her legislation, upright in all her dealings. Whenever such a Republic exists, it will be immortal: for rashness, injustice, intemperance and luxury in prosperity, and despair and disorder in adversity, are the causes of the decay and dilapidation of nations.

Religion would, in many points, not be comprehended by the ignorant, nor consolatory to them, nor guiding and supporting for them. The doctrines of the Bible are often clothed in the language of strict truth, but in that which was fittest to convey to a rude and ignorant people the practical essentials of the doctrine. A perfectly pure faith, free from all extraneous admixtures, a system of noble theism and lofty morality, would find too little preparation for it in the common mind and heart.

If justice takes place, there may be hope, even in the face of a seemingly capricious divinity.

to lend a book is an incitement to theft. A Reader on Reading p. 281

I ate civilization. It poisoned me; I was defiled. And then, he added in a lower tone, I ate my own wickedness.

Chastity—the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions, he added parenthetically, out of Remy de Gourmont .

The leech's kiss, the squid's embrace, The prurient ape's defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

I don't want comfort. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want goodness. I want sin.

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.

Groups are capable of being as moral and inteligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own, and is capable of anything except inteligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

Hell isn't merely paved with good intentions, it is walled and roofed with them.

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

But chastity means passion, chastity means neurasthenia. And passion and neurasthenia mean instability. And instability means the end of civilization. You can't have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices.

Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.