Robert Herrick Quotes

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

The essence of good and evil is a certain disposition of the will.

Good and evil are essential differences of the act of the will. For good and evil pertain essentially to the will; just as truth and falsehood pertain to the reason, the act of which is distinguished essentially by the difference of truth and falsehood (according as we say that an opinion is true or false.) Consequently, good and evil volition are acts differing in species.

There is nothing good or evil save in the will.

The act of willing this or that, of choosing among various courses of conduct, is central in the realm of ethics.

The power of choosing good and evil is within the reach of all.

The imperative is to define what is right and do it.

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible.

[Humans'] capacity to intervene, to compare, to judge, to decide, to choose, to desist makes them capable of acts of greatness, of dignity, and, at the same time, of the unthinkable in terms of indignity.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

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.

An action is the perfection and publication of thought. A right action seems to fill the eye, and to be related to all nature.

It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy mothers many an ugly fact.

Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do?

Evil, as evil, can never be chosen; and though evil is often the effect of our own choice, yet we never desire it but under the appearance of an imaginary good.

[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

But the only way never to do the wrong thing is never to do anything.

Intention, good or bad, is not enough.

The deepest, the intelligible, part of the nature of man is that part which does not take refuge in causality, but which chooses in freedom the good or the bad.