top of page
.png){kind=small}
"There are few uglier traits of human nature than this tendency-which I now witnessed in men no worse than their neighbours-to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of inflicting harm."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Ethics quotes
"The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth."
"I have a yearning for my beautiful country, and I love its people because of their misery. But if my people rose, simulated by plunder and motivated by what they call "patriotic spirit" to murder, and invaded my neighbour's country, then upon the committing of any human atrocity I would hate my people and my country."
"I've never seen exquisite fallen beings, and I never shall see them, but such creatures as that painted Frenchwoman at the counter with the ringlets are vermin to my mind, and all fallen women are the same.' 'But the Magdalen?' 'Ah, drop that! Christ would never have said those words if He had known how they would be abused. Of all the Gospel those words are the only ones remembered."
"Never look for justice in this world, but never cease to give it."
"Sweep aside those hatred-eaten mystics, who pose as friends of humanity and preach that the highest virtue man can practice is to hold his own life as of no value. Do they tell you that the purpose of morality is to curb man's instinct of self-preservation? It is for the purpose of self-preservation that man needs a code of morality. The only man who desires to be moral is the man who desires to live."
"It isn't a natural thing to keep on worrying about the morality of one's material prosperity. These are proclivities superinduced by modern conditions of the conscience. There is a natural resistance in every healthy human being to such distressful heart-searchings."
"The task of the moral philosopher-thinker is to support and strengthen the voice of human conscience, to recognize what is good or what is bad for people, whether they are good or bad for society in a period of evolution. May be a "voice crying in the wilderness", but only if that voice remains lively and uncompromising, it is possible to transform the desert into fertile land."
"A gift consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer."
"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
Explore more quotes by Nathaniel Hawthorne
"Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not."
"The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed."
"The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits."
"All brave men love; for he only is brave who has affections to fight for, whether in the daily battle of life, or in physical contests."
"Our most intimate friend is not he to whom we show the worst, but the best of our nature."
"Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them."
bottom of page