George Edward Moore Quotes

Some things must be good in themselves, else there could be no measure whereby to lay out good and evil.

There is no principle worth the name if it is not wholly good.

Human nature is not of itself vicious.

If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.

Moral choices do not depend on personal preference and private decision but on right reason and, I would add, divine order.

Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.

No one may do evil that good may come.

You cannot institute any equality between right and wrong.

What is right is not derived from the rule, but the rule arises from our knowledge of what is right

Of God and Evil, there is nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

The means you use must be as pure as the ends you seek.

We should challenge the relativism that tells us there is no right or wrong, when every instinct of our mind knows it is not so, and is a mere excuse to allow us to indulge in what we believe we can get away with. A world without values quickly becomes a world without value.

Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.

Being decent is the only thing that matters in a terrible world like this.

What is beautiful is moral, that is all there is to it.

Truth is sought not because it is truth but because it is good.

Did it ever strike you that goodness is not merely a beautiful thing, but by far the most beautiful thing in the whole world? So that nothing is to be compared for value with goodness; that riches, honor, power, pleasure, learning, the whole world and all in it, are not worth having in comparison with being good; and the utterly best thing for a person is to be good, even though they were never to be rewarded for it.

All good things are cheap: all bad are very dear.

In philosophy class I think we finally decided that 'good' is an infinitely recursive term - it can't be defined except in terms of itself. Good is good because it's better than bad, though why it's better to be good than bad depends on how you define good, and on and on.

If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the CAUSE of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into what is the cause of GOODNESS, so why of the other shop?

The absolute good is not a matter of opinion but of nature.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

Only on the assumption of belief in the validity of values is the attempt to espouse value-judgments meaningful. However, to judge the validity of such values is a matter of faith .

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