Jean Francois Paul de Gondi Quotes

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

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.

Morality is the tendency to pour out the baby with the bathwater.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

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 think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Conscience is a man's compass, and though the needle sometimes deviates, though one often perceives irregularities in directing one's course by it, still one must try to follow its direction.

Conscience is a just but weak judge. Weakness leaves it powerless to execute its judgment.

...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Prudence reproaches; conscience accuses.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

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.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

I'm not saying you did the wrong thing. I'm not even saying it wasn't something I'd thought of doing, myself. But even if it was the just thing to do, or the fitting thing, it still wasn't the right thing.

The moral man is as guilty as the rest. His morality cannot save him.

The rules of morality are not the conclusion of our reason.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

Reason often makes mistakes, but conscience never does.

In the real world in which we live, you always have to choose between evils. And in choosing between evils, you have to have moral criteria for how to make those choices.

All moral laws are merely statements that certain kinds of actions will have good effects.

Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural.

I do what I think is right.