Ethics and Morality

The best of all the preachers are the men who live their creeds.

 

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

 

Pathos, piety, courage—they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value.

 

How beastly the bourgeois is especially the male of the species.

 

He said likewise That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies, That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright, But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

 

Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King— Else, wherefore born?

 

Man’s word is God in man.

 

There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds.

 

Hold thou the good; define it well; For fear divine Philosophy Should push beyond her mark, and be Procuress to the Lords of Hell.

 

But the jingling of the guinea helps the hurt that Honor feels.

 

Against stupidity the very gods Themselves contend in vain. 6

 

If you want to know yourself, Just look how others do it; If you want to understand others, Look into your own heart.

 

World history is the world’s court. 2

 

Foolish men who accuse a woman mindlessly— you cannot even see you cause what you abuse.

 

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small. 1

 

Each class preaches the importance of those virtues it need not exercise. The rich harp on the value of thrift, the idle grow eloquent over the dignity of labor.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

You can’t make people good by Act of Parliament.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one’s age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality.

Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach.

The worst of doing one’s duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

[ Punch line of joke about a scorpion stinging a frogthat is carrying him across a river despite the fact that this would result in both their deaths :] I can’t help it. It’s my nature.