Mark Twain Quotes

You are wrong, sir, if you think that a man who is any good at all should take into account the risk of life or death; he should look to this only in his actions, whether what he does is right or wrong, whether he is acting like a good or a bad man.

Morality covers our conduct, not what goes on inside our heads.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

The issues of the choice between right and wrong has to be an ongoing concern for everybody, at every age. There is no magical point in a human life when anyone is or becomes immune to the second-by-second choice to do right instead of wrong.

A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.

I've still got my senses about me, and I know what's right and wrong, which is the main thing.

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

It is a wicked thing to be neutral between right and wrong.

The act of acting morally is behaving as if everything we do matters.

I try to do the right thing.

You know, there's a right and wrong way to do everything.

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

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

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

I'm not any more moral than my neighbors.

In day-to-day life, you have stimulus to behave unethically, but in the long term, it always pays off to be ethical.

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

Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that morality is not just a matter of opinion.

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

Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.

What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

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

Nothing has ever moulded our conscience so strongly as our knowledge of what is good and what is evil.