"Moral principle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... if I thought, or think, he ever deserted the Republican party in heart? I answer, no; for I do not think he ever had any well-defined political or moral principle, and was influenced always by what he deemed would subserve his own ambitious views; and you ask me, if I ever thought him a great man? Men greatly differ, as you will find as you grow older, and become better acquainted with mankind, as to what constitutes a great man. I think Colonel Burr's talents ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... and it was to her careful training that his development was due. At fourteen years of age, he was apprenticed to a printery and served until he was of age. From the first he was remarkable for his firmness of moral principle and for an inflexible adherence to his convictions, no matter at ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... one which yields to none of its predecessors in its call for manliness of character—for men of the right stamp. The perils of the times are imminent, and the demand for a high grade of intelligence and great strength of moral principle never was stronger. New developments of human genius and activity, are constantly arising, and new dangers to the dearest interests of society are calling for vigilance. This is neither a stagnant nor a tame and quiet age. It is an age of activity, of enterprise, ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... abroad, they associate the idea of drinking with all that is manly and genteel. They fall into the custom, and imitate the example that is set them. Circumstances and situations expose one to more temptations than the rest. Perhaps his resolution, or his moral principle, is not so strong; and in this way, one out of twenty-five of those who live to thirty years of age becomes intemperate. He becomes so, perhaps not from any uncommon predisposition to the vice, but is at first led on ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... alike, and the chivalry that I suggest is more than I could have been capable of, at any period of my life. They seemed to be country-lasses, of sturdy and wholesome aspect, with coarse-grained, cabbage-rosy cheeks, and, I am willing to suppose, a stout texture of moral principle, such as would bear a good deal of rough usage without suffering much detriment. But how unlike the trim little damsels of my native land! I desire above all things to be courteous; but, since the plain truth must be told, the soil and climate of England ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... and shall not therefore act on vague suspicion; but the boy whom I do suspect is one whose course lately has given me the deepest pain; one who has violated all the early promise he gave; one who seems to be going farther and farther astray, and sacrificing all moral principle to the ghost of a fleeting and most despicable popularity—to the approval of those whom he ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... thinking over what she had started to accomplish, and what arguments she should use to influence those whom she would ask to sign the agreement. The great idea, with a moral principle behind it, took possession of her mind and drove sleep from her eyes and aroused the energies of the soul. Why undertake the arduous task alone? Why not ask Doctor Cooper to preach about it? If she could but get the ministers enlisted, they ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... committing a fatal crime; she was an object of fear to all who knew the dark hints which had been let fall about her, and there were some that believed—Why, what was this but an instance of the total obliquity and degeneration of the moral principle? and to what could it be owing, but to an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... qualification, in the sequel, "not so far as to incur absolute dishonor," and "virtue is by no means to be sacrificed," seem saving clauses. But Cicero certainly has a right to be his own interpreter since in the De Officiis as I think, he explains in full and in accordance with the highest moral principle, what he means here, and we have a double right to insist on this interpretation first, because the De Officiis was written so very little while after the De Amicitia, and both at so ripe an age, that a change of opinion on important matters was improbable and secondly, because in the later ...
— De Amicitia, Scipio's Dream • Marcus Tullius Ciceronis
... a chest of tea in three 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 ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... of introducing him to the Ettrick Shepherd. But of my acquaintances, I valued few more than my modest and poetic friend, the late James Brown of Symington.[2] Though humble in station, he was high in virtuous worth. His mind, imbued with and regulated by sound religious and moral principle, was as ingenious and powerful as his heart was ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... composed of molasses, aquafortis, turpentine, and various other drugs, and instructed me to take a wine-glass full of it every fifteen minutes. I never took but one dose; that was enough; it robbed me of all moral principle, and awoke every unworthy impulse of my nature. Under its malign influence my brain conceived miracles of meanness, but my hands were too feeble to execute them; at that time, had it not been that my strength had surrendered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... events, which of all that ever were put on record stand off from each other in most irreconcilable enmity: the one originating, as Mr. Coleridge has observed, in excess of principle; the other in the utter defect of all moral principle whatever; and the progress of each being answerable to its origin! Yet so it is. And not a memoir-writer of that age is reprinted in this, but we have a preface from some red-hot Anti- jacobin warning us with much vapid common-place from the ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... opening rosebuds. He had already become accustomed to the dangerous experiment of resisting his own inward convictions; and this new impulse to ambition, combined with the strong temptation of variety in love, met the ardent young man weakened in moral principle, and unfettered by laws of the land. The change wrought upon him was soon noticed ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... am starting some novel theory just because those who are moving in this world are in the habit of talking differently though they are really acting up to it all the time. Therefore they fail to understand, as I do, that this is the only working moral principle. In point of fact, I know that my idea is not an empty theory at all, for it has been proved in practical life. I have found that my way always wins over the hearts of women, who are creatures of this world of reality and do ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... bar but, we believe, never came into practice. He is tha author of several humorous pieces, and of many in which the intention to be humorous was not realized. He is what the English call a very CLEVER man. Like many others who excel in ridicule and sarcasm, he is devoid of that kind of moral principle which makes a writer prefer the Just to the Dashing. Aytoun is a fierce Tory in politics—a snob on principle. The specimens of his humorous poetry contained in this collection were taken from the "Ballads of Bon Gaultier," and the "Idees Napoleoniennes," editions ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... would look "like an attempt in the General Government to correct a State for the undisputed exercise of its constitutional powers;" the revenue would be inconsiderable, and the United States had nothing to do with the moral principle; while a prohibitory tax would be defensible, a small tax like this would be useless as a protection and criminal ...
— The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America - 1638-1870 • W. E. B. Du Bois
... escaped the contagion, which makes me suspect that his own taste was vicious; from whence it might happen that he judged other men by himself." You, Eusebius, will be perfectly of Montaigne's opinion. We would rather trust that there are few in whom this moral principle has no vitality whatever. The wayside beggar, when he divides his meal—which, perhaps, he has stolen—with his dog, acts from its kind impulse; and see how uncharitable I am at my first impulse, to suppose, to suggest that the meal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... had eaten only what she thought good for them. She had invariably gained her point; and she had gained it with few words, without temper or agitation, by sheer force of character. If she had been a moral principle she could ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... who have been rendered infamous by their conviction of great crimes, are deemed incompetent to give evidence. This rule has been adopted, because the commission of an infamous crime implies, as Sir William Scott has observed, "such a dereliction of moral principle on the part of the witness, as carries with it the conclusion that he would entirely disregard the obligation of an oath." Of such a witness it has been said, by another eminent judge,[102] that "the credit of his oath is over-balanced by the stain ...
— The Principles of Masonic Law - A Treatise on the Constitutional Laws, Usages And Landmarks of - Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... a flash of sympathetic spirit in the object of her displeasure, Cigarette changed from wrath to friendship with the true instinct of her little heart of gold. A heart which, though it had been tossed about on a sea of blood, and had never been graven with so much as one tender word or one moral principle from the teachings of any creature, was still gold, despite all; no matter the bruises and the stains and the furnace-heats that had done their best to harden it into bronze, to ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... human rights, and the unrighteousness of oppression in this republican country. Being kept from all the moral and religious instruction which Sabbath schools, the Bible, and other good books are calculated to impart, and with those undefined notions of liberty, and without any moral principle, they are prepared to enter into the first insurrectionary movement proposed by some artful and talented leader. The same notion prevailed in the West Indies half a century since, and many of the planters resisted and persecuted the benevolent Moravians, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... senses can impart no more than they receive. Is it, then, in the mind? Here we are compelled to ask, What is understood by the mind? Do we mean the understanding? We can trace no relation between the Truth we would class and the reflective faculties. Or in the moral principle? Surely not; for we can predicate neither good nor evil by the Truth in question. Finally, do we find it identified with the truth of the Spirit? But what is the truth of the Spirit but the Spirit itself,—the conscious I? which is never even thought of ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... never ventured to attempt—to abstain from labour, and endure want and starvation for months together, for an object of which they often in secret disapprove—it may be conceived how wide-spread and fatal is the confusion of moral principle, and habits of idleness and insubordination thus produced. Their effects invariably appear for a course of years afterwards, in the increased roll of criminal commitments, and the number of young persons of both sexes, who, loosened ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... creature to Austria, Prince Karacsay would have some work to keep him in order. Dane was not the man to settle to a dull, respectable existence or to earn his bread without a little excitement. A dangerous man, and the more dangerous from his enormous vanity and utter want of moral principle. ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... Mr. ——, I explain to him that I should be under the necessity of looking more closely into the business here from his conduct at Buddonness, which had given an instance of weakness in the Moral principle which had staggered my opinion of him. His answer was, 'That will be with regard to the lass?' I told him I was to enter no farther with him upon the subject." "Mr. Miller appears to be master and man. I am sorry about this foolish fellow. Had I known his train, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who have been convicts are termed 'old hands'; they are mostly rude, rough men, with no moral principle or religious feeling, and who have little sympathy ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... successor, but the personal influence is no longer the same, any more than that of Leo XIII. can be compared with that of Pius IX., though all the world is aware of the present Pope's intellectual superiority and lofty moral principle. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... some heart very dear to us. It may smoulder in the bosom which is most cherished by us, and we may be perfectly unconscious of its existence there. Perhaps circumstances will not cause its development; perhaps moral principle may have bound it down with fetters ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth;—"living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death. The very falsehoods of Mohammed are truer than the truths of such a man. He is the insincere man: smooth-polished, respectable in some times and places; inoffensive, says nothing harsh to anybody; most cleanly,—just ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... and as the people had very little opportunity to become acquainted with the real merits of the case in respect to questions of government, they gave their votes very much according to the personal popularity of the candidate. Public men had very little moral principle in those days, and they would accordingly resort to any means whatever to procure this personal popularity. They who wanted office were accustomed to bribe influential men among the people to support ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... had brought to him no peace; it had only made him more unhappy than he was before. But why should it do this? Was he not doing what was best? Would it not be better for Uncle Billy, for Mrs. Burnham, for himself? Must he, for the sake of some farfetched moral principle, throw himself into the merciless clutch of ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... thoughtful kindness, and to the deep and reverent regard for spiritual things, of his distinguished parishioner. As an example of untiring energy, of probity of character, of cleanness of soul, of uprightness of life, of sincerity of purpose, of firmness of moral principle, he may safely be held up as a ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... The moral principle which so naturally and so justly occurs to the mind of those who have been educated under a settled government of laws that protect the property of the weak against the incursions of the strong, was to poor Elspat a book sealed and a fountain closed. She had been ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... business, about which I have read columns and columns and columns of comment these two days and turned every conceivable proposition back and forth in my mind—in this whole wretched waste of comment, I have not seen even an allusion to any moral principle involved nor a word of concern about the Mexican people. It is all about who is the stronger, Huerta or some other bandit, and about the necessity of order for the sake of financial interests. Nobody recalls our action in giving Cuba to the Cubans or our pledge to ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... final aim is to guide men in the way of life. The spirit in which it is composed is the spirit of conviction; its essence, both in the root of it and the fruit of it, is faith, and that primarily in a moral power above, and ultimately a moral principle within, both equally divine. The one principle of the book is that loyalty to the divine commands is the one foundation of all ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... others who, while not feeling that any moral principle is immediately involved in the matter of diet, yet would like to be relieved from the necessity of eating flesh, possibly on aesthetic grounds, or it may be from hygienic reasons, or in some cases, I hope, because they would willingly diminish the sufferings involved in the transport ...
— New Vegetarian Dishes • Mrs. Bowdich
... burdensome debts. He was a gambler, too, and, of course, devoid of moral principle. His object was to pay his debts with ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... strongly excited, and that a man's only safety was in controlling the circumstances which tended to excite them. This was specially true, he said, in respect to the passion of love. The experience of mankind, he said, had shown that no strength of moral principle, no firmness of purpose, no fixedness of resolution, no degree of suffering, no fear of shame, was sufficient to control, in the hearts of men, the impetuosity of the passion of love, when it was once fairly awakened. In a word, Araspes advocated, on the subject of love, a sort of ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... Buckle. He says that the history of the world shows enormous progress in all kinds of knowledge, in institutions, in commerce and manufactures, and in every pursuit of human activity, but not in knowledge of moral principle. The most ancient wisdom in morals is also the most modern. Time and the progress of civilization have added nothing to the demands of the conscience or to moral perception. The golden rule is an axiom of the ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... 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 poisons another, no matter how much the poison costs, the ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... may be sure that there is not an entire absence of connection between the private code of a school and its international conceptions. The feeling that success covers everything seems to be gaining ground and to be overcoming, not merely the old conventional rules of honour, but moral principle itself. Both in public and private there are symptoms of an approaching failure of the motive power which has hitherto sustained men both in self- sacrificing effort and in courageous protest against wrong, though as yet we are only at the threshold of the great change, and established ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... carry out this great moral principle of which we are treating; it is nevertheless right, and men who abuse its facts and turn things upside down are guilty of opposing ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... beneficent! Were there more streams from the mountain, there would be more fruits upon the plain. The world would not be the scorched desert which it is, in which the vipers of envy and discontent hiss and sting; but a fragrant garden, full of the fruits of social order and of moral principle. Truly, man might learn many a useful lesson from the earth on which he treads: the great, to dispense freely out of their abundance,—for by dispensing they but multiply their blessings, as Mont Blanc, by sending down its streams to enrich the plain, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... combination of devotion and metaphysics found in this work similar to the tone of many Mahayanist sutras but the manifestation of Krishna in his divine form is like the transformation scenes of the Lotus.[181] The chief moral principle of the Bhagavad-gita is substantially the same as that prescribed for Bodhisattvas. It teaches that action is superior to inaction, but that action should be wholly disinterested and not directed to any selfish object. This is precisely ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... with nothing to help you but credit? Without recourse to any moral principle, having for your foundation only individual selfishness, and the satisfaction of material desires? Universal peace, and the happiness of mankind as a whole, being the result! Is it really so that I may understand ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... 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 ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... into two castes, as well as the use of force in government and war, are opposed to every moral principle professed by our modern society. Yet the cultivated and advanced men of the day seem not ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... world will come to us if we only wait. It will be seen that Socrates is at once the oldest and most modern of thinkers. He was the first to express the New Thought. A thought, to Socrates, was more of a reality than a block of marble—a moral principle was just as persistent as ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... law, in establishing property, has not been the expression of a psychological fact, the development of a natural law, the application of a moral principle. It has literally CREATED a right outside of its own province. It has realized an abstraction, a metaphor, a fiction; and that without deigning to look at the consequences, without considering the disadvantages, without inquiring whether it was ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... barely negative, blind, ungodly nature-power, which obstinately resists all influence of the Divine; hence, as products, of the spirit of the [Greek: ύλη], (of the [Greek: πνεύμα ύλικον].. Pneuma Hulikon), are Satan, malignant spirits, wicked men, in none of whom is there any reasonable or moral principle, or any principle of a rational will; but blind passions alone have the ascendency. In them there is the same conflict, as the scheme of Platonism supposes, between the soul under the guidance of Divine reason the [Greek: νούς... Nous], and the soul blindly resisting ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... 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
... exercise of compulsion by the authorities is absolutely foreign to the free society, and cannot be taken into consideration at all. The modern opinion concerning the population question, the opinion that is gradually acquiring the force of a moral principle—viz. that it is reprehensible to beget a large number of children—must prove itself to be sufficiently powerful for the purpose, it being taken for granted, of course, that means of prevention were available which were absolutely ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... remain at the courthouse to hear the coming speech against the pecuniary demands of himself and his order, he said "that the clergy had not thought him worthy of being retained on their side," and that "he knew of no moral principle by which he was bound to refuse a fee from their adversaries."[57] So, too, the conciliatory words, which, after the trial, he tried to speak to the indignant plaintiff, and which the latter has reported in the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... If one of them is present in a high degree, and the others in a low degree, the whole is inharmonic, and not highly advantageous. The highest societal value seems to go with a harmonious combination, although it may be of lower grades. A man of talent, practical sense, industry, perseverance, and moral principle is worth more to society than a genius, who is not morally responsible, or not industrious. Societal value also conforms, in a general way, to worldly success and to income from work contributed to the industrial organization, for genius which was not effective ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... Sir James Stephen, the Duke of Argyll, Lord Tennyson, and Dean Church, would gather around to hear and discuss a paper read by one of the members upon such questions as: 'What is death?' 'Is God unknowable?' or 'The nature of the Moral Principle'. Sometimes, however, the speculations of the Society ranged in other directions. 'I think the paper that interested me most of all that were ever read at our meetings,' says Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant-Duff, 'was one on "Wherein consists the special beauty of imperfection ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... were informed of Nero's attachment to Acte, and of the connection which had been established between them, they were at first much perplexed to know what to do. They were men of strict moral principle themselves, and as Nero had been their pupil, and was still, while they continued his ministers, in some sense under their charge, they thought it might be their duty to remonstrate with him on the course which he was pursuing, and endeavor to separate him from his vicious companions, and bring ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... so easily into the heart of Pearl Bryan, came only from the lips and never from the heart of him who lent his every effort to win the heart of the belle of Putnam County, as Pearl Bryan was known, but with no manly or honorable purpose. Scott Jackson was void of moral principle and honor, and never did anything with a manly purpose, he ...
— The Mysterious Murder of Pearl Bryan - or: the Headless Horror. • Unknown
... it may be asked, what is to prevent repeated and continued aggression? I answer, first, not instruments of destruction, but the moral principle which God has placed in the bosom of every man. I think that obedience to the law of God, on the part of the injured, is the surest preventive against the repetition of injury. I answer, secondly, suppose that acting in obedience to the law of benevolence will not prevent the repetition of injury, ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... moral principle, elasticity of mind and body, and perfect willingness to obey my orders, even though given harshly...I have been extremely unfortunate in the choice of my ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... unfeigned humility of the Christian, over your own personal course, and the example connected with it. Aim at keeping up, on all occasions, a high practical standard of sound morality at all points. Cultivate every germ of true moral principle in your own homes, and in the social circle about you. Let the holy light of truth, honor, fidelity, honesty, purity, piety, and love brighten the atmosphere of ...
— Female Suffrage • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... under better teaching than that of man. Revelations of his own soul, of God's intimate presence, of the grandeur of the creation, of the glory of disinterestedness, of the deformity of wrong-doing, of the dignity of universal justice, of the might of moral principle, of the immutableness of truth, of immortality, and of the inward sources of happiness; these revelations, awakening a thirst for something higher than he is or has, come of themselves to an humble, self-improving man. Sometimes ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... probable 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 ...
— History of King Charles II of England • Jacob Abbott
... proficiency exhibited by the Princess in the examination at which I was present, and the general correctness and pertinency of her answers, I am perfectly satisfied that Her Highness's education in regard to cultivation of intellect, improvement of talent, and religious and moral principle, is conducted with so much care and success as to render any alteration of the ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... realized. It is more even than a true idea; for no mere knowledge, however true, has such 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 spring and source of present activity. In so far as the agent ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... to be, ashamed of it, and indignantly resentful at being suspected of the immorality. The negro, on the other hand, is only terribly afraid of being punished, and on being forgiven feels immediately purified and free from sin. He has, in fact, no moral principle, and his code of honesty is comprised in a conversation I overheard this winter. Our youngest child seemed to have a vague, indefinite fear of rogues, and a very imperfect idea of what a rogue might be, and was always asking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... I mean our own portion of it, sometimes seems to me like one mighty slaughter-house—one grand school for the suppression of every kind, and tender, and brotherly feeling—one grand process of education to the entire destitution of all moral principle—one vast scene of destruction to all moral sensibility, and all sympathy with the woes of those around us. ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott |
