Ethical Perception Quotes

Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

The apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

The moral sense is a natural faculty in us like the sense of smell or of touch.

At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

To create guilt, all that you need is a very simple thing: start calling mistakes, errors - sins. They are simply mistakes, human. Now, if somebody commits a mistake in mathematics - two plus two, and he concludes it makes five - you don't say he has committed a sin. He is unalert, he is not paying attention to what he is doing. He is unprepared, he has not done his homework. He is certainly committing a mistake, but a mistake is not a sin. It can be corrected. A mistake does not make him feel guilty. At the most it makes him feel foolish.

Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. ...God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth.

The profoundest of all sensualities is the sense of truth and the next deepest sensual experience is the sense of justice.

Those born blind cannot see; similarly blind are those in the grip of lust. Proud men have no perception of evil; and those bent on acquiring riches see no sin in their actions.

it may be in morals as it is in optics, the eye and the object may come too close to each other, to answer the end of vision. There are certain faults which press too near our self-love to be even perceptible to us.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

What we think is ethical today, we may not have thought ethical five or 10 years ago. Cloning, stem cell research? However we feel about those things today, we may feel differently 10 years from now.

The relish of good and evil depends in a great measure upon the opinion we have of them.

We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

Sin rarely seems sin at first beginnings.

Prejudice of the learned. - The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

Good and Evil are names that signify our appetites and aversions, which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different: And diverse men differ not only in their judgment, on the senses of what is pleasant and unpleasant to the taste, smell, hearing, touch, and sight, but also of what is conformable, or disagreeable to Reason, in the actions of the common life. Nay, the same man, in diverse times, differs from himself, and one time praiseth, that is, calleth Good, what another time he dispraiseth, and calleth Evil.

Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile; Filths savour but themselves.

The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough.

Real genius of moral insight is a motor which will start any engine.

Men rarely see their own actions as unjustified.

If you can sense the corruption in me, it is ... because there's a dose of it in you.

Time is the clarity for seeing right and wrong.