moral rigidity Quotes

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Puritanism, in whatever expression, is a poisonous germ. On the surface everything may look strong and vigorous; yet the poison works its way persistently, until the entire fabric is doomed.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

It is right that we should stand by and act on our principles; but not right to hold them in obstinate blindness, or retain them when proved to be erroneous.

I never came across anyone in whom the moral sense was dominant who was not heartless, cruel, vindictive, log-stupid, and entirely lacking in the smallest sense of humanity. Moral people, as they are termed, are simple beasts.

As a stick, when once it is dry and stiff you may break it, but you can never bend it into a straighter posture; so doth the man become incorrigible who is settled and stiffened into vice.

Anyone who maintains absolute standards of good and evil is dangerous. As dangerous as a maniac with a loaded revolver.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus, they suck the life right out of a party.

Absolutist morality doesn't have to come from religion but usually does.

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

. . . it seems to me certain that more people are killed out of righteous stupidity than out of wickedness.

Morals, principles and laws are when faith is reduced to standards and those standards basically just bind us, and we become prejudicial, racist, self-serving when we're guided by these laws... When a developed country uses Christianity in its policies, in government, in maintaining corporate wealth, that's a bastardized rendering of a faith.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

If only the good were a little less heavy-footed

A sense of morality makes a person repetitive in thought and action. Such a person will obviously not get anywhere.

Morality, when formal, devours.

In lazy apathy let stoics boast, their virtue fixed, 'tis fixed as in a frost.

Moral standards cannot be changed by battle and cannot be changed by ballot.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

Morality binds and blinds.

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

I've always been extremely puritanical.