Emanuel Swedenborg Quotes

Every one may know that to will and not to do, when there is opportunity, is in reality not to will; and that to love what is good and not to do it, when it is possible, is in reality not to love it. Will, which stops short of action, and love, which does not do the good that is loved, is a mere thought separate from will and love, which vanishes and comes to nothing.

Anyone can see that intending and not acting when we can is not really intending, and loving and not doing good when we can is not really loving.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

My power for good, whatever it may, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines I have tried to preach.

Mankind censure injustice fearing that they may be the victims of it, and not because they shrink from committing it.

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.

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.

Moralizing and morals are two entirely different things and are always found in entirely different people

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.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.

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

There they are. See no evil, hear no evil, and...evil.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

Blot your misdeeds out (if you are particularly conscientious), by a good deed, as soon as you can; just as we did a correct sum at school on the slate, where an incorrect one was only half rubbed out. It was better than wetting our sponge with our tears; both less loss of time where tears had to be waited for, and a better effect at last.

No one does wrong voluntarily.

It's not enough not to be evil. We also actively try to be good.

The one who acts is always without conscience; nobody has a conscience but the contemplative person.

The consideration that human happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected will always continue to prompt me to promote the former by inculcating the practice of the latter.

Just as a person who is always asserting that he is too good-natured is the very one from whom to expect, on some occasion, the coldest and most unconcerned cruelty, so when any group sees itself as the bearer of civilization this very belief will betray it into behaving barbarously at the first opportunity.

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, piousness is virtue paying tribute to itself.

There is scarcely any man sufficiently clever to appreciate all the evil he does.