Cormac McCarthy Quotes

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

The primary goal in the education of children is to teach, and to give the example of, a virtuous life.

Virtue, though she gets her beginning from nature, yet receives her finishing touches from learning.

Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue-and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

Our virtues and vices couple with one another, and get children that resemble both their parents.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Good character is more to be praised than outstanding talent.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is Good.

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

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

The greatest work in all the world is the building of men and women of character. Without character there is not much that is worthwhile.

To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue.

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.

Nature does not bestow virtue; to be good is an art.

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

Character: the grandest thing in the world.

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

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.