Ethics and Morality

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.

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

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

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.

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.

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.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

All zeal for a reform that gives offense To peace and charity, is mere pretense.