Henry Ward Beecher Quotes

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

I give priority to up-bringing over education because the ultimate goal of up-bringing is morals, and we have a more urgent need for morals than for knowledge.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

Higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue.

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

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

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

Your ideas about right and wrong are just that-ideas. They are the thoughts which form the shape and create the substance of Who You Are. There would be only one reason to change any of these; only one purpose in making an alteration: if you are not happy with Who You Are.

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

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

True education does not consist merely in the acquiring of a few facts of science, history, literature, or art, but in the development of character.

We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

Sensibility appears to me to be neither good nor evil in itself, but in its application. Under the influence of Christian principle, it makes saints and martyrs; ill-directed, or uncontrolled, it is a snare, and the source of every temptation; besides, as people cannot get it if it is not given them, to descant on it seems to me as idle as to recommend people to have black eyes or fair complexions.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

The future success of our nation depends on our ability to understand the difference between right and wrong and to have the strength of character to make the right choices.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting

It is much more intelligent, more practical, to be good rather than evil.

We need to provide an education which teaches crit­ical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values.