Quotes About Ethics

As long as you honour material things, direct your anger at yourself rather than the thief or adulterer.

What is the product of virtue? Tranquillity.

As the sun does not wait for prayers and incantations to be induced to rise, but immediately shines and is saluted by all: so do you also not wait for clappings of hands, and shouts and praise to be induced to do good, but be a doer of good voluntarily, and you will be beloved as much as the sun.

Whoever then has knowledge of good things, would know how to love them; but how could one who cannot distinguish good things from evil and things indifferent from both have power to love?

Thus Socrates became perfect, improving himself by everything. attending to nothing but reason. And though you are not yet a Socrates, you ought, however, to live as one desirous of becoming a Socrates. 51.

Syyttää toisia omasta onnettomuudestansa on sivistymättömyyden merkki; syyttää itseänsä on sivistyksen alkeiden ilmaus, olla syyttämättä muita ja itseänsä on näyte ihmisen sivistyksestä.

Settle on the type of person you want to be and stick to it, whether alone or in company.

For determining the rational and the irrational, we employ not only our estimates of the value of external things, but also the criterion of that which is in keeping with one's own character. (Book I.2, 17p)

You must be one man, either good or bad. You must cultivate either your own ruling faculty or externals, and apply yourself either to things within or without you; that is, be either a philosopher, or one of the vulgar.

The Good stands before us like an archer's target. Evil is not a thing in itself but a missing of the mark, an arrow gone astray.

And every animal is better or worse from his own merit (virtue) or his own badness. Is there then no virtue in man only? and must we look to the hair, and our clothes and to our ancestors?

And who can give to another the things which he has not himself?

If someone turned your body over to just any person who happened to meet you, you would be angry. But are you not ashamed that you turn over your own faculty of judgment to whoever happens along, so that if he abuses you it is upset and confused?

Epictetus is not superior to Socrates; but if he is not inferior, this is enough for me; for I shall never be a Milo, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor shall I be a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, do we neglect looking after anything because we despair of reaching the highest degree.

I hope death overtakes me when I'm occupied solely with the care of my character, in an effort to make it passionless, free, unrestricted and unrestrained.

man of sense will not take part in politics either?; he knows the kinds of personal connections that politics involves. So what's to keep us from living as if we were as unsocial as flies?

you should not wait for clapping of hands and shouts and praise to do your duty; but do good of your own accord.

33] Consider at what price you sell your integrity; but please, for God's sake, don't sell it cheap.

I see good people dying of cold and hunger.' Well, don't you see wicked people dying of luxury, pride and excess?

If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.

But what says Socrates?—One man finds pleasure in improving his land, another his horses. My pleasure lies in seeing that I myself grow better day by day.

So – a true philosopher is under no obligation to respect vulgar opinion as to what is religious or irreligious, what is just or unjust. What dishonour he brings on philosophers in general if he did! That's not what you learned here.

Whatever is enough is abundant in the eyes of virtue.

Well, then, biting, kicking, wanton imprisonment and beheading – is that what our nature entails? No; rather, acts of kindness, cooperation and good will. And so, whether you like it or not, a person fares poorly whenever he acts like an insensitive brute.