Arthur Conan Doyle Quotes

Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil.

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

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

Subordination to morality can be slavish or vain or self- interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of despair, just as subordination to a prince can be: in itself it is nothing moral.

Whenever one refuses to admit such a self-evident truth, for instance, as that it is wrong to steal, don't argue with him-search him; the reason may be found in his pocket.

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

Every man prefers virtue, when there is not some strong incitement to transgress its precepts.

...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.

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

It's better to die doing good than to live doing evil.

Can any man have a higher notion of the rule of right and the eternal fitness of things?

The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization.

Virtue is nothing but an act of loving that which is to be beloved, and that act is prudence, from whence not to be removed by constraint is fortitude; not to be allured by enticements is temperance; not to be diverted by pride is justice.

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

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

That which is selfish is immoral, and that which is unselfish is moral.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

In ethics, prudence is not an important virtue, but in the world it is almost everything.

Morality, a muzzle for the will; logic, a climbing iron for the mind.

Ethics is a code of values which guide our choices and actions and determine the purpose and course of our lives.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.