Francis Hutcheson Quotes

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

Is not virtue a negation of becoming?

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent.

Virtue is nothing but an act of loving that which is to be beloved, and that act is prudence, from whence not to be removed by constraint is fortitude; not to be allured by enticements is temperance; not to be diverted by pride is justice.

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

[T]here is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists . . . an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.

The whole of virtue consists in its practice.

Of all the things of a man's soul which he has within him, justice is the greatest good and injustice the greatest evil.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

I believe in doing good for good's sake.

The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.

When goodness is lost, it is replaced by morality.

You can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.