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Exlpore more Morality quotes

"The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."

"We perhaps know more than we care to admit, keeping it down in the dark places of our memory-disavowed. When we eat factory-farmed meat we live, literally, on tortured flesh. Increasingly, that tortured flesh is becoming our own."

"One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred."

"The monks used to say that he was more drawn to those who were more sinful, and the greater the sinner the more he loved him."

"He did not see at the moment how foolish it was for two of them to go on alone, nor did the King. They were too angry to think clearly. But much evil came of their rashness in the end."

"The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?"

"No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word. It is every individual's individual code of behavior, by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol-cross or crescent or whatever-that symbol is man's reminder of his duty inside the human race. Its various allegories are the charts against which he measures himself and learns to know what he is. It cannot teach man to be good as the textbook teaches him mathematics. It shows him how to discover himself, evolve for himself a moral code and standard within his capacities and aspirations, by giving him a matchless example of suffering and sacrifice and the promise of hope."
Explore more quotes by Vladimir Nabokov


"Why did I hope we would be happy abroad? A change of environment is that traditional fallacy upon which doomed loves, and lungs, rely."


"A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That's what I like about coincidence."


"Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality, the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me."


"The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind."


"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
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