Quotes About Morality

No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;

respectability to good impulses

To deny oneself is to act no more from the standing ground of self.... No longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart. Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what reception they may have, shall be our concern.

If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love.

Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of a broken basin, or a dirty rag.

The things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get rid of them a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell.

Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of the truth.

God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!

I think it far better for a man to go wrong upon his own honest judgment, than to go right upon anybody else's judgment, however honest also.

There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word.

It is yet better to perceive a hidden good than a hidden evil.

that for God to give a man because he asked for it that which was not in harmony with his laws of truth and right, would be to damn him-to cast him into the outer darkness.

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets?

For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think—only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar.

Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you.

Truly, if ignorance is the foundation of any man's goodness, it is not worth the wind that upsets it, but in its mere self, ignorance of evil is a negative good.

The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.

If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover.

She was beginning to learn that a man may be right, although the creed for which he is ready to die may contain much that is wrong.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The only good human being is a dead one.

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.