Quotes About Ethics

Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman.

When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.

One must have a good memory to be able to keep the promises one has given. One must have strong powers of imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality bound to the quality of the intellect.

What can everyone do? Praise and blame. This is human virtue, this is human madness.

What really arouses indignation against suffering is not suffering as such but the senselessness of suffering...

He who fights monster should beware, lest he become a monster himself

All thy passions in the end became virtues, and all thy devils, angels.

The state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen.

All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values.

The worst things, however, are the petty thoughts. Verily, better to have done evilly than to have thought pettily!

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.—Nietzsche.

Behold the good and just! Whom do they hate most? The man who breaks their tables of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker:- yet he is the creator.

if you kill a cockroach you are a hero, if you kill a butterfly, you are evil. morals have aesthetic criteria.

Our age knows better.... What was formerly merely sickly now becomes indecent—it is indecent to be a Christian today.

Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

All history is the experimental refutation of the theory of the so-called moral order of things.

The knight of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies, but also to hate his friends.

And if your friend does evil to you, say to him, ''I forgive you for what you did to me, but how can I forgive you for what you did to yourself?

Man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.

But strangers and the poor may pluck for themselves the fruit from my tree: that causes less shame. But beggars should be entirely done away with! Truly, it annoys one to give to them and it annoys one not to give to them.

Fear is the mother of morality.

Every means hitherto employed with the intention of making mankind moral has been thoroughly immoral.

The man who has come to know vice in connection with pleasure... imagines that virtue must be associated with displeasure.