White lies are at the other end of the spectrum of deception from lies in a serious crisis. They are the most common and the most ...trivial forms that duplicity can take. The fact that they are so common provides their protective coloring. And their very triviality, when compared to more threatening lies, makes it seem unnecessary or even absurd to condemn them. Some consider all well-intentioned lies, however momentous, to be white; I shall adhere to the narrower usage: a white lie, in this sense, is a falsehood not meant to injure anyone, and of little moral import.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign to... us: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If only people would realize that moral principles are like measles.... They have to be caught. And only the people who've got the...m can pass on the contagion.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensation...s which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world comp...osed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[If not re-elected in 1864] then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the el...ection and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act... of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In literary representation, the distinction between the genuinely erotic and the licentious is a distinction not of subject-matter..., but of perspective. The genuinely erotic work is one which invites the reader to re-create in imagination the first-person point of view of someone party to an erotic encounter. The pornographic work retains as a rule the third-person perspective of the voyeuristic observer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »