Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington Quotes

Education must have two foundations --morality as a support for virtue, prudence as a defense for self against the vices of others. By letting the balance incline to the side of morality, you only make dupes or martyrs; by letting it incline to the other, you make calculating egoists.

The very idea that we get a moral compass from religion is horrible. Not only should we not get our moral compass from religion, as a matter of fact we don't.

Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.

We need leadership that can elevate religion and morality to their position of paramount importance and thus eliminate growing selfishness, immorality and materialism.

Intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Many good people practice no faith at all.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

In truth, the care and expense of our fathers aims only at furnishing our heads with knowledge; of judgement and virtue, little news.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Father asked us what was God's noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

The world is divided into men who have wit and no religion and men who have religion and no wit.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

The problem is that religion tends to give people bad reasons to be good.

Any simple claim that you need religion to be good is flat wrong.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

The natural desire of good men is knowledge.

His faith perhaps in some nice tenets might be wrong; his life, I'm sure, was always in the right.

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

I want people to come away from my book with questions. Questions about virtue and goodness. Not answers.

In 'Reclaiming Virtue,' I argue that we have had an element missing in moral education. That element is 'affect.' Affect is simply the technical word for feeling or emotion.

Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.