Ethical Life Quotes

To live is not a blessing, but to live well.

The ethical life... is maintained in being by a common culture, which also upholds the togetherness of society... Unlike the modern youth culture, a common culture sanctifies the adult state, to which it offers rites of passage.

It is not living that matters, but living rightly.

The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.

A life is measured by how it is lived for the sake of heaven.

It’s pretty simple, the ethical life. It’s just demanding.

The man or woman who lives worthily now is in a state of salvation.

If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by every one, must be the best. And the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city.

Jews bear children not only because the carnal election of Abraham must continue. For Jews, raising children is essential to living a rounded ethical life.

Faith exalts the human heart, by removing it from the market-place, making it sacred and unexchangeable. Under the jurisdiction of religion our deeper feelings are sacralized, so as to become raw material for the ethical life: the life lived in judgement.

When I try to outline the history of ethical life, it's sometimes possible to find evidence for a hypothesis about how important transitions actually went. Often, however, that isn't so. There are many facts about human life in the Paleolithic we're never likely to know.