Moral Understanding 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.

You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.

You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.

I am very far from practicing what I understand.

Nothing would be more profitable to us than a right history of mankind.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

We cannot freely and wisely choose the right way for ourselves unless we know both good and evil.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

Any great art is meant to illuminate the human condition.

We human beings are humane in part because we can look beyond our biology.

The gods plant reason in mankind, of all good gifts the highest.

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

A true friend of mankind whose heart has but once quivered in compassion over the sufferings of the people, will understand and forgive all the impassable alluvial filth in which they are submerged, and will be able to discover the diamonds in the filth.

Wisdom is not mathematical, nor astronomical, nor zoological; when it talks too much of any one thing it ceases to be itself. There are wise physicists, but wisdom is not physical; there are wise physicians, but wisdom is not medical.

Thanks to technology, what almost anybody can do has been multiplied a thousandfold, and our moral understanding about what we ought to do hasn't kept pace.

If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.

We know how God would act if he were in our place - he has been in our place.

The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, and they that lack the beginning have neither middle nor end

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

Humans eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad. Suddenly, they start cutting reality up into bits and pieces, which is what the thinking mind does.

Literature sucks you into another psyche. So the creation of empathy necessarily influences how you'll behave to other people.