"Moral principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... months, and the amount of the butcher's bill is fabulous; Jane gives the baby laudanum to quiet it, while she slips out to her parties; and the upper classes are shocked at the demoralized state of the Irish, their utter want of faithfulness and moral principle! How dreadful that there are no people who enjoy the self-denials and the cares which they dislike, that there are no people who rejoice in carrying that burden of duties which they do not wish to touch with one of their fingers! The outcry about the badness of servants means ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... soul is said to be only a witness or spectator and not an actor. The Rishis understood by the soul the being to whom the mind, the senses, etc., all belong. Could the idea of the inactive and unsinning Soul have arisen from observation of the moral principle of Conscience which discriminates between right and wrong, and acts, therefore, as an impartial judge, or watches everything like an uninterested spectator? European moralists generally attribute two other functions to the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... it makes no difference what is done with the liquor— whether it is used in the arts or not—it is a question of policy. There is no moral principle involved on our side of the question, to say the least of it. If it is a crime to make and sell intoxicating liquors, the Government, by licensing persons to make and sell, becomes a party to the crime. If one man ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... and abasement. His work constantly recalls to our minds the theory that the cultivated classes are in debt to the people for the education which they have received at the people's expense. This is the great moral principle which governs the conscience of the Russian "intellectuals." It is in this sense then, that Korolenko may be said to continue the literature of 1870, and to be the successor of Zlatovratsky and Uspensky. But he has reincarnated this past in new forms, which naturally result from the activity of ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... Crimean war was to Mr. Gladstone the vindication of the public law of Europe against a wanton disturber. This was a characteristic example of his insistent search for a broad sentiment and a comprehensive moral principle. The principle in its present application had not really much life in it; the formula was narrow, as other invasions of public law within the next dozen years were to show. But the clear-cut issues of history only disclose themselves in ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... root to the proletarian's grievance against the artist—the feeling that the moral principle of mutuality is violated in their relationship. The workman plows for him, cooks for him, builds for him, spins for him, but what does he do in return? He paints pictures, makes statues, writes novels or poems or plays or sonatas which ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... article gives colour to the theory that Hazlitt occasionally borrowed from Lamb's conversation. In Lamb's letter to Wordsworth of April 20, 1816, he has the celebrated description of Coleridge, "an archangel a little damaged." Hazlitt in this article writes: "If he had had but common moral principle, that is, sincerity, he would have been a great man; nor hardly, as it is, appears ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... But it is questionable if any such positive judgment as was necessary, and therefore right, in his contemporaries, is obligatory upon historians. What he did was in accord with a political principle which he had avowed, and it was not in conflict with any moral principle he had ever avowed, for he did not pretend to believe that slavery was wrong. True, he had once thought the Missouri Compromise a sacred compact; but there were signs that he had abandoned that opinion. It is enough to decide that he took a wrong course, and to point out how ambition may ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... and, while the member of the primeval tribe feels he has no right to rob or murder within the limits of his tribe, he has no compunction whatever about robbing or murdering or injuring the members of some other tribe. So the moral principle in its practical working is limited to the range of the sympathy of the tribe, which does not go beyond the tribal limits. We see how that principle works still in the world, from the beginning clear up to the highest reaches which ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... intimate relation to the self-consciousness of man as his moral ideal. A mathematical axiom, and the statement of a physical law, express what is true; but they do not occupy the same place in our mind as a moral principle. Such a principle is an ideal, as well as an idea. It is an idea which has causative potency in it. It supplies motives, it is an incentive to action, and, though in one sense a thing of the future, it is also the actual ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... critics see only, or chiefly, in the fearful and momentous conflict in which we are engaged, "a bursting of the bubble of Democracy"! Shall we challenge now the intelligence or the moral principle, the lack of one or the other of which is betrayed in this sneering and malignant representation—this utter misrepresentation—of the catastrophe which has befallen our nation? Intelligent Englishmen know full well that the issue raised ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... the side he votes for wins.' He votes as a matter of fact in accordance with ideas of right or wrong. 'His motive, when it is an honourable one, is the desire to do right. We will not term it patriotism or moral principle, in order not to ascribe to the voter's frame of mind a solemnity that does not belong to it.' But ideas of right and wrong are strengthened and not weakened by the knowledge that we act under the eyes of our neighbours. 'Since then the real motive ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... disallows action before us. Animal instincts give us pleasure—as the industry of bees—without reference to morals; and in like manner human actions are a pleasure to us when we consider in them only the relation of means to ends. But if a moral principle be added to these, and impropriety be discovered, if the idea of moral agent comes in, a deep indignation succeeds our pleasure, which no intellectual propriety can remedy. We must not call to mind too vividly that Richard III., Iago, and Lovelace ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... decide the question]. We disapprove of falsehood, injustice, and unprovoked violence, even although more happiness would result from them than from the contrary. Moreover, we are not always judges of the whole consequences of acting. Undoubtedly, however, benevolence is our duty, if there be no moral principle to oppose it. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain
... sentence so often quoted since, "A physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance." This expressed the secret of his whole life. Every fact in nature was sacred to him, as part of an intellectual conception expressed in the history of the earth and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... indeed, by the force of mere authority, so control his pupils as to preserve order in the schoolroom, and secure a tolerable progress in study, but the progress will be slow, and the cultivation of moral principle must be, in such a case, entirely neglected. The principles of duty can not be inculcated by fear; and though pain and terror must in many instances be called in to coerce an individual offender, ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... them; if my political party refuses to be the instrument in doing this, from benevolent motives, or from any other cause, He will make that party to be defeated, it may be by a party below us in moral principle, as we view it. This question of slavery, its extension and continuance, is therefore among the great problems of God's providence. I shall do all that I properly can to prevent it, and to encourage, and, if called upon, to aid my brethren now ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... PRINCIPLE.—Many of our young men lack moral principle. They cannot look upon a beautiful girl with a pure heart and pure thoughts. They have not manifested or practiced that self-control which develops true manhood, and brings into subordination evil thoughts, evil passions, and evil practices. Men who have no self-control ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... many plays favourably received throughout Europe, over-flowing with ebullitions of good-heartedness and traits of magnanimity, and in which, notwithstanding, a keener eye cannot fail to detect the hidden purpose of the writer to sap the foundations of moral principle, and the veneration for whatever ought to be held sacred by man; while all this sentimentality is only to bribe to his purpose the effeminate soft-heartedness of his contemporaries [Footnote: The author it is supposed alludes to Kotzebue.—TRANS.]. On the other hand, if any person were to undertake ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... that Charles derived whatever moral principle and sensitiveness of conscience that he possessed from the influence of his mother in his early years. She was a faithful and devoted Catholic; she honestly and firmly believed that the rites and usages of the Catholic Church were divinely ordained, and that ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... lost the first flush of the new enthusiasm which gave it birth as a party opposed to the extension of slavery. The signs of the times had been so clear between 1856 and 1860 that many politicians had turned their coats less from a moral principle than from a desire to win. When Lincoln took up the organization of his Administration, these clamored for their rewards. There was nothing in the political ethics of the sixties that discountenanced the use of the spoils of office, and Lincoln himself, though he resented ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... also, by this interesting and most memorable passage, how completely the question is admitted to be one of ethics—the only real point at issue being, whether this face or that is developed on the truer moral principle. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... to demonstrate the truth of the contention made in these pages, that in refusing to co-operate with others in building up a permanently secure democratic government, they were actuated by no high moral principle, but simply by a desire to gain power. The position of Russia to-day would have been vastly different if the wisdom manifested in the following paragraphs had governed Lenine and his associates in the days when Kerensky was ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... is generally characterized for other evils as associated and produced by his lying.—The degeneracy of moral principle which can impose upon the credulity of mankind by the invention and statement of what is known to be untrue is capable of other acts of vice and immorality. Hence the prophet Hosea, in speaking to the Israelites of the judgments ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate |
