Quotes About Ethics

No one praises happiness as one praises justice, but we call it a 'blessing,' deeming it something higher and more divine than things we praise.

Coarse rice to eat, water to drink, my bended arm for a pillow - therein is happiness. Wealth and rank attained through immoral means are nothing but drifting clouds.

There must be some mixture of happiness in everything but sin.

It must be admitted that the conception of virtue cannot be separated from the conception of happiness-producing conduct.

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

Any pleasure that does no harm to other people is to be valued.

If we cannot live so as to be happy, let us at least live so as to deserve it.

It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.

One who, while seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other living beings who also desire happinesss, will not find happiness hereafter.

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

Virtue and integrity are necessary for genuine happiness. Guard your integrity with care.

It appeared to me obvious that the happiness of mankind should be the aim of all action, and I discovered to my surprise that there were those who thought otherwise.

My own view is that Kant's conception of the duality of the good (morality and happiness, the good of our person and the good of our state or condition) is a distinctively modern view.

How rarely can happiness be really innocent and not triumphant, not an insult to the deprived.

All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.

our right or wrong use of money is the utmost test of character, as well as the root of happiness or misery, throughout our whole lives.

Essentially pursuit of happiness is saying, everything's allowed until we come down on it.

By physical liberty I mean the right to do anything which does not interfere with the happiness of another. By intellectual liberty I mean the right to think and the right to think wrong.

Virtue alone is happiness below.

When we ... devote ourselves to the strict and unsparing performance of duty, ihen happiness comes of itself.

Being a joyful vegan is the best way I know to contribute to the happiness of others, ultimately ensuring our own happiness.

We've lost our sense of ethics; we live in a world of small-mindedness, of gratification without happiness and actions without meaning.

An ethical act is one which does not harm others' experience or expectation of happiness.

I want to show that there are indeed some universal ethical principles which could help everyone to achieve the happiness we all aspire to.