Ben Jonson Quotes

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

By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

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.

Man can sin against nature in two ways. First, when he sins against his specific rational nature, acting contrary to reason. In this sense, we can say that every sin is a sin against man's nature, because it is against man's right reason.

True knowledge gives a moral standing and moral strength.

We have next to consider the formal definition of virtue.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

"Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are."

The moral sense is as much a part of our constitution as that of feeling, seeing, or hearing.

The principles of ethics come from our own nature as social, reasoning beings.

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 man cannot have character unless he lives within a fundamental system of morals that creates character.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

To many people virtue consists chiefly in repenting faults, not in avoiding them.

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.

So from then on, he looked at all his choices and said, What would a good person do, and then did it. But he has now learned something very important about human nature. If you spend your whole life pretending to be good, then you are indistinguishable from a good person. Relentless hypocrisy eventually becomes the truth.

We know that the exercise of virtue should be its own reward, and it seems to follow that the enduring of it on the part of the patient should be its own punishment.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

The right for the right's sake is the motto which everyone should take for his own life. With that as a standard of value we can descend into our hearts, appraise ourselves, and determine in how far we already are moral beings, in how far not yet.

The sum of all is, if we would most truly enjoy this gift of Heaven, let us become a virtuous people.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.