ethical improvement Quotes

Every formed disposition of the soul realizes its full nature in relation to and dealing with that class of objects by which it is its nature to be corrupted or improved.

The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely.

All religions are essentially the same in their goal of developing a good human heart so that we may become better human beings.

The cause which is blocking all progress today is the subtle scepticism which whispers in a million ears that things are not good enough to be worth improving. If the world is good we are revolutionaries, if the world is evil we must be conservatives. These essays, futile as they are considered as serious literature, are yet ethically sincere, since they seek to remind men that things must be loved first and improved afterwards.

Philosophy should be an energy; it should find its aim and its effect in the amelioration of mankind.

Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.

Man must become better and more evil.

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

The Church, therefore, has two constant needs; instruction in the truths by which it must live, and correction of the shortcomings by which its life is marred.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

Light, whether it be material or moral, is the best reformer.

In a thousand apparently humble ways men busy themselves to make some right take the place of some wrong,--if it is only to make abetter paste blacking,--and they are themselves so much the better morally for it.