Peter Abelard Quotes

A man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad.

You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

In fact we say that an intention is good, that is, right in itself, but that an action does not bear any good in itself but proceeds from a good intention. Whence when the same thing is done by the same man at different times, by the diversity of his intention, however, his action is now said to be good, now bad.

You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action - that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one.

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 is no such thing as character other than the habitual action, as Mr. Aristotle told us two thousand years ago.

[R]eason is... given to us as a practical faculty, that is, as one that influences the will.

Oh, I hate the cheap severity of abstract ethics!

My Gita tells me that evil can never result from a good action.

But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.

Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the world's most influential living moral philosophers. He has written 30 books on ethics and held a variety of professorial chairs over the past four decades in North America.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

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

My only fear is doing something contrary to human nature - the wrong thing, the wrong way, or at the wrong time.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.

In the 17 years since I graduated from this great College of Law, I have seen that, for many of us, it becomes increasingly easy to rationalize our actions in the name of expediency when facing difficult decisions-to choose a path where the ends justify the means. I want to ask you to challenge Machiavelli's philosophy. I want to humbly suggest that you be the guardians of a more complicated truth: that the means are as important-and sometimes even more important-than the ends.

There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

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.

Every perfect action is accompanied by pleasure. By that you can tell what you ought to do.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

The doing evil to avoid an evil cannot be good.