Moliere Quotes

If you are going to do something wrong at least enjoy it.

Be good only if being bad ain't more fun.

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.

Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.

Sensual excess drives out pity in man.

Everybody is a hypocrite. You can't live on this planet without being a hypocrite.

I can't help it. I want to be a good Catholic, but I'm a hedonist.

We as a country, our lust for entertainment has sort of superseded our sense of self-preservation.

I had sold my soul for pleasure.

The philosophy of hedonism means little to lovers of pleasure. They have no inclination to read philosophy, or to write it.

In this world, either you're virtuous or you enjoy yourself. Not both, lady, not both.

When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"

If I were a young man With my bones full of marrow, Oh, if I were a bold young man Straight as an arrow, I'd store up no virtue For Heaven's distant plain, I'd live at ease as I did please And sin once again.

To an age which has unashamedly sold itself to the gods of greed, pride, sex, and self-will, the church mumbles on about God's kindness but says virtually nothing about his judgment... The fact is that the subject of divine wrath has become taboo in modern society, and Christians by and large have accepted the taboo and conditioned themselves never to raise the matter.

Human beings have neither kindness, nor faith, nor charity beyond what serves to increase the pleasure of the moment.

The more bad choices you make, the less bad your choices seem.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

I hear you reproach, "But delay was best, For their end was a crime." Oh, a crime will do As well, I reply, to serve for a test As a virtue golden through and through, Sufficient to vindicate itself And prove its worth at a moment's view! . . . . . . Let a man contend to the uttermost For his life's set prize, be it what it will! The counter our lovers staked was lost As surely as if it were lawful coin; And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost Is-the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, Though the end in sight was a vice, I say.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Selfish hedonism is not a pejorative. It is a description - an exactly accurate description of what is involved in homosexual relations.

So far as he is able, a prince should stick to the path of good but, if the necessity arises, he should know how to follow evil.

The more hedonistic you were, the better...I very much subscribed to that as a young artist.

Let us start a new religion with one commandment, "Enjoy thyself.

If I should go out of church whenever I hear a false statement I could never stay there five minutes. But why come out? The streetis as false as the church, and when I get to my house, or to my manners, or to my speech, I have not got away from the lie.

Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a "necessary evil", it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.