Ethics and Morality

Generosity lies less in giving much than in giving at the right moment.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

There’s no system foolproof enough to defeat a sufficiently great fool.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true.

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.

With Pleasure own your Errors past, And make each day a Critic on the last.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

The most powerful cause of error is the war existing between the senses and reason.

Generally speaking, the errors of religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.

Error is acceptable as long as we are young; but one must not drag it along into old age.

Shame on all eloquence which leaves us with a taste for itself and not for its substance.

If men live decently it is because discipline Saves their very lives for them.

Insects sting, not in malice, but because they want to live. It is the same with critics: they desire our blood, not our pain.

What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but absence of self-criticism.

Conscience is a man’s compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one’s course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.

I have bought this wonderful machine—a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine— it seems to me to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Civilization: if it is not in man’s heart—well, then, it is nowhere.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

No change of circumstances can repair a defect of character.