Quotes About Morality

Purpose ... is held to be most closely connected with virtue, and to be a better token of our character than are even our acts.

For it is not true, as some treatise-mongers lay down in their systems, of the probity of the speaker, that it contributes nothing to persuasion; but moral character nearly, I may say, carries with it the most sovereign efficacy in making credible.

Perfected by the offices and duties of social life, man is the best, but, rude and undisciplined, he is the very worst of animals.

Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.

Without action there cannot be a tragedy; there may be without character.

Man is armed with craft and courage, which, untamed by justice, he will most wickedly pervert, and become at once the most impious and the fiercest of monsters.

Happiness is a thing which calls for honor rather than for praise.

The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

Bad men are full of repentance.

The precepts of the law may be comprehended under these three points: to live honestly, to hurt no man willfully, and to render every man his due carefully.

Without virtue it is difficult to bear gracefully the honors of fortune.

Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

On a similar principle they consider that to know right and wrong is nothing clever, because what the laws speak about it cannot be hard to understand. But this is not justice, except incidentally: it is when actions are done or awards are made in a certain way that they become just.

Happiness consists in the consciousness of a life in which the highest Virtue is actively manifested.

Men fancy that because doing wrong is in their own power, therefore to be just is easy. But it is not so: to lie with one's neighbour's wife, and to strike some one near, and the giving with the hand the bribe ... are easy acts, and in men's own power; but to do these things with the particular disposition is neither easy nor in their power.

Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.

One may perhaps be led to suppose that it is virtue that is the end of the statesman's life. Yet even virtue itself would seem to fall short of being an absolute end.

We must as a second best, as people say, take the least of the evils.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Every science and every inquiry, and similarly every activity and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.