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 »
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 »
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 »
He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please h...im, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body o...r moral nature, there the State enters "woman's peculiar sphere," her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the fam...ily rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A critic, after a life devoted to spoiling the pleasure of others, was astonished to find himself in eternal hellfire. "Judge not,... lest ye be Judged," giggled a passing fiend, and all Hades rocked with laughter at this wit. Moral: When you have all Eternity to get through, it is a blessing to be among those who are easily amused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »