Cynthia Ozick Quotes

Books follow morals, and not morals books.

I'm very interested in good and evil and the moral natures of people.

Our ideals are our better selves.

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

Everything I do has a moral to it.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

Courage is the most important of the virtues because it is the one that makes all the others possible.

To be good is noble but to show others how to be good is nobler.

Base thy life on principle, not on rules.

The aim of poetry, it appears, is to fill the mind with lofty thoughts--not to give it joy, but to give it a grand and somewhat gaudy sense of virtue. The essay is a weapon against the degenerate tendencies of the age. The novel, properly conceived, is a means of uplifting the spirit; its aim is to inspire, not merely to satisfy the low curiosity of man in man.

People often tell me I could be a great man. I'd rather be a good man.

[C]ourage is reckoned the greatest of all virtues; because, unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.

Over the last few years, I've been focusing on questions having to do with the self, and questions having to do with morality. I'm very interested in why we do good things, or bad things, and where moral judgments come from.

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.... The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

History teaches us virtue, but nature never ceases to teachh us vice.

There is nothing which strengthens faith more than the observance of morality.

Knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.

Writing, even though it's hard work, is really a joy when you get these characters to come alive. It's hard to trace where they come from. I can't say that I am sitting here one night at nine o'clock and that a character occurs to me. The magic for me happens at the typewriter.

To amend mankind, moralists should show them man, not as he is, but as he ought to be.

Poetry is a dividend from what you know and what you are.

Purpose ... is held to be most closely connected with virtue, and to be a better token of our character than are even our acts.

Ethics, decency and morality are the real soldiers

Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.

A good man therefore is a standing lesson to us all.