Quotes About Morality

Lymond said gently, Let us bathe in moral philosophy, as in a living river. Double-dealing is my business.

Marthe said, her face streaked and silvered with tears, "I could not have done that. I fear nothing and no one. I respect nothing and no one. But I could not have done that." "You have done it," Jerott said. "It is easy to do it, out of hatred. But you are right. I know of no one else on earth who could have done it out of love.

So,' said Mary, 'you would condemn the human race to hell, for want of enlightenment?' 'Why not?' said Francis Crawford. 'It has nothing to fear, surely, from hell.

Nostradamus said, according to Archie, that the Gods sell the goods that they give us. We had been shown a fine instrument. But the bow could be overlong bent; the harp lose its voice if its strings were not loosened.' 'I hope he said so in Francis's hearing. Poor Archie,' said Marthe. 'Did he say what should be loosened? His morals?

The trouble with Austin was that he believed so deeply in the chivalrous virtues that he found it impossible to refer to them.

You'll seek out strumpets, fumble with courtiers, fornicate with either parent of the heiress you are supposed to be marrying, but to embrace your wife sickens you?' The music stopped in the room; and the movement. 'Ah,' said Lymond. His face had emptied. 'From a new host and an old harlot, the good Lord deliver us.

The arrangement, temporary or otherwise, was usually public and acknowledged when at the highest level; only when it was clandestine and conducted to the injury of legitimate relatives did it become untenable in the oblique moral eye of society.

He's s o damned moral that he ought to be standing rear up under a Bo Tree.

None of that, however, concerned Buccleuch who was little troubled, if ever, with matters of right and wrong.

A pity, she thought, that taking a stand on moral issues had to prove so lonely these days

To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

this is the weakness of most 'edifying' or 'propaganda' literature. There is no diversity...You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him, said Miss Hillyard. It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of. But that, said Peter, was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.

I always said the professional advocate was the most amoral person on the face of the earth. I'm certain of it now.

After all, he thinks conscience is a sort of vermiform appendix. Chop it out and you'll feel all the better.

Nobody minds coarseness, but one must draw the line at cruelty -Lord Peter Wimsey

You know,' he said. 'I rather liked Ferguson, and I couldn't stick Campbell at any price. I rather wish—' 'Can't be helped, Wimsey,' said the Chief Constable. 'Murder is murder, you know.' 'Not always,' said Wimsey.

You can't carry through any principle without doing violence to somebody. Either directly or indirectly. Every time you disturb the balance of nature you let in violence. And if you leave nature alone you get violence in any case.

By that time we shall, I hope, be moving in different circles. I shall be in the one devoted to murderers, and you in the much lower and hotter one devoted to those who tempt others to murder them.

of my own honesty.

principles have become more dangerous than passions. It's getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does—if it really is a principle—is to kill somebody." "'The real tragedy is not the conflict of good with evil but of good with good'; that means a problem with no solution.

They knew, with the painful conviction of experience, what it meant to say, "I see and approve the better, but follow the worse.

When I was young and bold and strong, The right was right, the wrong was wrong. With plume on high and flag unfurled, I rode away to right the world. But now I'm old - and good and bad, Are woven in a crazy plaid. I sit and say the world is so, And wise is s/he who lets it go.

When I was young and bold and strong, Oh, right was right, and wrong was wrong!