Charles Caleb Colton Quotes

He, who practices right, but in the hope of acquiring great renown, is very near to vice.

Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

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.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

The final arbitrator in philosophy is not how we think but what we do.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

To all the rest of his Absurdities, (for vice is always unreasonable,) he adds one more, who expects that Vertue from another which he won't practise himself.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

Let us be moral. Let us contemplate existence.

Genuine religion is not about speculating about God or the soul or about what happened in the past or will happen in the future; it cares only about one thing—finding out exactly what should or should not be done in this lifetime.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

We must learn to distinguish morality from moralizing.

Men are guided less by conscience than by glory; and yet the shortest way to glory is to be guided by conscience.

It is vice to go to bed with someone you are not married to or have someone of your own sex or to get money for having sex with someone who does not appeal to you-incidentally, the basis of half the marriages of my generation.

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

A sin is nothing but a deordination of reason, but that is enough.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.

To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

It could be anything. It could be Jesus and it could be the Furby and it could be the lint that lives in my navel, but it's probably not. Whatever it is, I doubt we as humans on Earth could have any perception of it while we're here. So, why give yourself a headache thinking about it. Just be a good person. That's what an ethicist is.

I'm not a believer in predetermined fates, being rewarded for one's efforts. I'm not a believer in karma. The reason why I try to be a good person is because I think it's the right thing to do. If I commit fewer bad acts there will be fewer bad acts, maybe other people will join in committing fewer bad acts, and in time there will be fewer and fewer of them.