Swami Sivananda Quotes

The endeavor to understand is the first and only basis of virtue.

Morality is not only taught; it is caught.

Education is the art of making man ethical.

We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

I profoundly believe it takes a lot of practice to become a moral slob.

Guided by nothing but pop culture values, many children no longer learn how to think about morality and virtue, or to think of them at all. They grow up with no shared moral framework, believing that the highest values are diversity, tolerance and non-judgmentalism.

All effective actions require the passport of morality.

It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

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.

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

We should reserve the notion of 'morality' for the ways in which we can affect one another's experience for better or worse. Some people use the term 'morality' differently, of course, but I think we have a scientific responsibility to focus the conversation so as to make it most useful.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Ethics are pre-determined and a matter of discovery, not a evolved concept.

. . . Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed . . . so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.

Ye must leave righteous ways behind, not to speak of unrighteous ways.

A man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.