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Quotes about morality

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A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite. And to act so is immoral.
Leo Tolstoy1828–1910Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence (1886)
- Animals
- Food
It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person’s pride.
Leo Tolstoy1828–1910Path of Life (1909), p. 108
- Pride
Hell is paved with good intentions.
?UnattributedAs repeated by Samuel Johnson in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol II (14 April 1775); an older proverb (George Herbert, 1640: “Hell is full of good meanings and wishings”)Often credited to Samuel Johnson
What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Chapter IV, aphorism 153, tr. Helen ZimmernIn context
- Good & Evil
- Love
Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality,
And the vast that is evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead.
Walt Whitman1819–1892Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Roaming in Thought, 1
- Good & Evil
Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.
John F. Kennedy1917–1963At the signing of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, Bonn, West Germany (24 June 1963)
There are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel of good which shall in due time be made whole.
Helen Keller1880–1968The Story of My Life (1903), Ch. 21
- Good & Evil
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;
His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.
Alexander Pope1688–1744An Essay on Man (1734)In context
- Faith
Be frustrate, all ye stratagems of Hell,
And devilish machinations come to nought.
John Milton1608–1674Paradise Regained (1671), Book I: Lines 72-73
- Good & Evil
There can be no Good Will. Will is always Evil; it is persecution to others or selfishness.
William Blake1757–1827Annotations to Swedenborg (1788)
- Good & Evil
If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say “give them up,” for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.
Robert Louis Stevenson1850–1894Across the Plains (1892), Ch. XII, A Christmas Sermon.
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
George Eliot1819–1880Letter to Charles Bray (15 November 1857)
To cease from evil, to do good, and to purify the mind yourself, this is the teaching of all the Buddhas.
Gautama Buddha501–501 BCDhammapada, Ch. 14, Verse 183
- Good & Evil
He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.
Leonardo da Vinci1452–1519XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.
- Good & Evil
The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Aldous Huxley1894–1963“Words and Behaviour”, The Olive Tree (1936)
- Politics