Quotes About Moralist

The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be asolipsist.

Is the conclusion then that a pessimistic criticism of life necessarily makes a poet greater than another poet who criticizes it from an optimistic point of view? Not in the least. The consideration—we do not say to the positive philosopher, to the historian, to the moralist, but—to the disinterested lover of poetry, is simply irrelevant.

But no subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned, however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself must support it.

Within the range of Macdonald's accomplishments, there are sizable gaps. The largest, surely, is that, unlike Lincoln, he never appealed to people's "better angels." He was a doer, not a thinker, although highly intelligent and omnivorously well read. He lacked the certitudes of a moralist, instead taking human nature as he found it and turning it to his purposes.

There is no stricter moralist than Fear; and no moralist is a stranger to Fear.

It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their age, against which they are protesting.

I am too much a moralist at heart, and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form, rather than entertain them.

Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people's behavior.

The statesman and moralist Cato the Censor defined an orator as "a good man skilled in speech.

Some moralist or mythological poet Compares the solitary soul to a swan; I am satisfied with that, Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it, Before that brief gleam of its life be gone.

Perhaps he even needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatist and an historian, and in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and seer and 'free spirit' and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths into every height, from the corners into every wide expanse.

He committed the mistake of supposing that the abusinessa part of human affairs was the whole of them; all at least that the legislator and the moralist had to do with. Not that he disregarded moral influences when he perceived them; but his want of imagination, small experience of human feelings, and ignorance of the filiation and connexion of feelings with one another, made this rarely the case.

It is just as little necessary for the saint to be a philosopher as for the philosopher to be a saint; just as it is not necessary for a perfectly beautiful person to be a great sculptor, or for a sculptor to be himself a beautiful person. In general it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses.

There is a special pleasure in the irony of a moralist brought down for the very moral failings he has condemned. It's the pleasure of a well-told joke. Some jokes are funny as one-liners, but most require three verses: three guys, say, who walk into a bar one at a time, or a priest, a minister, and a rabbi in a lifeboat. The first two set the pattern, and the third violates it. With hypocrisy, the hypocrite's preaching is the setup, the hypocritical action is the punch line.

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

I know of no American who starts from a higher level of aspiration than the journalist. . . . He plans to be both an artist and a moralist -- a master of lovely words and merchant of sound ideas. He ends, commonly, as the most depressing jackass of his community -- that is, if his career goes on to what is called a success.

Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Though sages may pour out their wisdom's treasure, there is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a solipsist.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Boredom is a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half of the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me—as you judge me—from my fluency.

Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but he loved the real man.