Quotes About Morality

How does he learn to take that crucial step? Does he learn it the hard way, that if he is going to get along he has to go along, as Pufendorf suggested? Or is there a simpler, more uplifting way, by which we learn that virtue can be its own reward?

Being "civilized" had originally meant living under Roman, or "civil," law; but at the dawn of the Renaissance it had come to denote a way of life and law distinct from that of barbarism. It included prohibitions against murder, incest, and cannibalism; belief in a transcendant creative divinity; respect for property and legal contracts; and essential social institutions such as marriage, friendship, and the family.

To make the moral achievement implicit in science a source of strength to civilization, the scientist will have to have the cooperation also of the philosopher and the religious teacher.

Heus, kuisheid is alleen iets voor de laagste klasse. [...] Ik ben nog nooit aan een hof geweest waar ze met de kuisheid erg nauw waren.

My personal conviction is that science is concerned wholly with truth, not with ethics.

One may not regard the world as a sort of metaphysical brothel for emotions.

Honor is decency without vanity.

The principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers.

The use of fetuses as organ and tissue donors is a ticking time bomb of bioethics.

And let me tell you this: our higher senses are blunted. We are so drenched with material sin, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it

And let me tell you this: our higher senses are so blunted, we are so drenched with materialism, that we should probably fail to recognize real wickedness if we encountered it.

The saint endeavours to recover a gift which he has lost; the sinner tries to obtain something which was never his. In brief, he repeats the Fall.

I think the tragic feeling is invoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing -- his sense of personal dignity.

Look, we're all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house --in the bedroom he's asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he's rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he's paying his taxes, in the yard he's raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he's making a bomb to blow it all up.

Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!

I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.

You are pulling down heaven and raising up a whore

How strangely distributed are our scruples. When they are evenly spread across our lives, we are judged good people. Mine, unfortunately, tend to bunch up.

I! I who fashioned myself a sorcerer or an angel, who dispensed with all morality, I have come back to the earth.

I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation. Morality is the weakness of the brain.

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies shall I uphold? In what blood tread?

Morality is the weakness of the mind.

I came a fabulous opera. I saw that all beings have a fatality for happiness: action is not life, but a way of spending your strength, an irritation. Morality is a weakness of the brain.

Elle est retrouvée! -Quoi? -l'Éternité. C'est la mer mêlée Au soleil. Je devins un opéra fabuleux : je vis que tous les êtres ont une fatalité de bonheur : l'action n'est pas la vie, mais une façon de gâcher quelque force, un énervement. La morale est la faiblesse du cerveau. À chaque être, plusieurs autres vies me semblaient dues. Ce monsieur ne sait pas ce qu'il fait : il est un ange.