Thomas Jefferson Quotes

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

Man has no moral instinct. He is not born with moral sense. You were not born with it, I was not - and a puppy has none. We acquire moral sense, when we do, through training, experience, and hard sweat of the mind.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Morality binds and blinds.

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

There are a few dogmas and double standards and really regrettable exports from philosophy that have confounded the thinking of scientists on the subject of morality.

A growing body of evidence suggests that humans do have a rudimentary moral sense from the very start of life.

Contemporary moral philosophy has found an original way of being boring, which is by not discussing moral issues at all.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

Morality's not practical. Morality's a gesture. A complicated gesture learnt from books.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

We are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

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.

Every act of every man is a moral act, to be tested by moral, and not by economic criteria.

The moral earth, too, is round! The moral earth, too, has its antipodes! The antipodes, too, have their right to exist! There is still another world to be discovered--and more than one! Set sail, you philosophers!

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.