Marcus Aurelius Quotes

There can be no compromise on basic principles. There can be no compromise on moral issues. There can be no compromise on matters of knowledge, of truth, of rational conviction.

If you're going to live in a community, you have to refrain from killing one another and stealing from one another. You must have honor and honesty in your dealings with one another. But I think the deeper thing that we need to do is to become so fully human that we don't grasp at life; we give life away. We give love away. We give being away. That is the ultimate work of religion.

It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.

A philosopher goes where the truth leads and has no patience with mere emotion.

I want to share what I have, and I'd rather share it with people that are a little bit more open-minded.

This state of mind, which subordinates the interests of the ego to the conservation of the community, is really the first premise for every truly human culture... The basic attitude from which such activity arises, we call-to distinguish it from egoism and selfishness-idealism. By this we understand only the individual's capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men.

The only equitable manner in my opinion, of judging the character of a man is to examine if there are personal calculations in his conduct; if there are not, we may blame his manner of judging, but we are not the less bound to esteem him.

Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and the water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being, first and foremost, and as such I'm for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Being rational is a moral Imperative. You should never be stupider than you need to be.

I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organized beliefs.

The effective thinker treats arrogance as the major sin of thinking.

Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life.

Men who are ruled by reason desire nothing for themselves which they would not wish for all mankind.

It takes courage to have a conscience when you seem to see others getting something tangible out of not bothering to struggle with the morality of a situation. It gets frustrating and demoralizing. This is precisely where character comes in. All throughout history special people have felt compelled to do what they objectively saw as right and good - even in the face of humiliation or rejection or expulsion or torture or death. That is because they believed that certain ideas were more important than individual well-being.

I'm a Jewish boy from Jersey. I was born with a strong sense of right and wrong, and a strong sense that the world can be a ludicrous, unfair, inhumane place.

When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.

I was never one to stand on a soap box and say, "This is how you need to live your life!" It was never about that.

True respectability stems not from the will of the majority but from proper reasoning.

Happy will be those who give ear to the words of the dead: - The reading of good works and the observing of their precepts.

Give people a convincing reason and they will lay down their very lives.