Lyman Abbott Quotes

Thus you are just not because you give what is owed, but because you do what is appropriate to you as the highest good.

Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him.

We have, all of us, our duties. Every action of our lives, and every word that we utter, will either conduce to or detract from the discharge of our duty.

He who can at all times sacrifice pleasure to duty approaches sublimity.

One can aim at honor both as one ought, and more than one ought, and less than one ought. He whose craving for honor is excessive is said to be ambitious, and he who is deficient in this respect unambitious; while he who observes the mean has no peculiar name.

Gratitude, being nearly the greatest of human duties, is also nearly the most difficult.

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures.

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

Knowing what is right does not make a sagacious man.

You must do right before you feel good.

Do the right thing because it is right.

Performance of duty and observance of morality are convertible terms.

I fear this is not the right exchange to attain virtue, to exchange pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains and fears for fears, the greater for the less like coins, but that the only valid currency for which all these things should be exchanged is wisdom.

Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

Neither pleasure nor pain should enter as motives when one must do what must be done.

Stern daughter of the voice of God! O Duty! if that name thou love Who art a light to guide, a rod To check the erring and reprove.

The brave man wants no charms to encourage him to his duty, and the good man scorns all warnings that would deter him from fulfilling it.

No vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied.

Do your duty, and don't swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.

[Women's] duty is nothing else than the fulfilment [sic] of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.

Do what you should, not what you may.

The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.