Matthew Arnold Quotes

Morality represents for everybody a thoroughly definite and ascertained idea: the idea of human conduct regulated in a certain manner.

For they, the philosophers, were considered teachers of right living, which is far more excellent, since to speak well belongs only to a few, but to live well belongs to all.

Kant taught us that we should follow just those rules of conduct that we would want everybody to follow. Few find this generalization of The Golden Rule a great help.

You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as to praise him for playing by the rules.

There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.

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

There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

Do you know what morals are? Morals are an obedience to rules that people laid down to help you live among them.

must acknowledge, that to act properly is much more valuable than to think justly or reason acutely.

The end of all knowledge should be in virtuous action.

Strictly speaking, there are no such things as good and bad impulses. Think...of a piano. It has not got two kinds of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.

We must now examine whether just people also live better and are happier than unjust ones. I think it's clear already that this is so, but we must look into it further, since the argument concerns no ordinary topic, but the way we ought to live.

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. This isn’t a good idea. This isn’t right.” “There’s all kinds of right,” he murmured. “On the spectrum, we’re still in the safe zone.” ... “Definitely right. Usually right,” Patch continued. “Mostly right. Maybe right.

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

I have yet to meet a man as fond of high moral conduct as he is of outward appearances.

D'you know how embarrassing it is to mention good and evil in a scientific laboratory? Have you any idea? One of the reasons I became a scientist was not to have to think about that kind of thing.

I think that ethical behaviour is another feature of the kind of inner discipline that leads to a happier existence.

Out of right thinking comes right practice. It is not true that it does not matter what a man believes. It is not true to say, as many say, that a man's beliefs do not matter, it is only his conduct which is of importance; no lasting right conduct grows out of wrong belief. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking.

Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be promoted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.

Beautiful thoughts hardly bring us to God until they are acted upon. No one can have a true idea of right until he does it.

...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.

Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

One of them is knowing the difference between Morality and Wisdom. Morality is temporary, Wisdom is permanent… Ho ho. Take that one to bed with you tonight.