Quotes on Ethics

The ethic of Reverence for Life is the ethic of Love widened into universality.

A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company

Within each of us lies the power of our consent to health and sickness, to riches and poverty, to freedom and to slavery. It is we who control these, and not another.

Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.

No amount of ability is of the slightest avail without honor.

In matters of conscience, the law of the majority has no place.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

The answer is that there is no good answer. So as parents, as doctors, as judges, and as a society, we fumble through and make decisions that allow us to sleep at night--because morals are more important than ethics, and love is more important than law.

Do not be a magician - be magic!

Satiety depends not at all on how much we eat, but on how we eat. It's the same with happiness, the very same...happiness doesn't depend on how many external blessings we have snatched from life. It depends only on our attitude toward them. There's a saying about it in the Taoist ethic: 'Whoever is capable of contentment will always be satisfied.

Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.

Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government.

Dare to be honest and fear no labor.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.

The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

Duty is what one expects from others.

Ordinary morality is innate in my view.

Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth.