Moralists Quotes

Too many moralists begin with a dislike of reality. - Clarence Day

The pulpit and the press have many commonplaces denouncing the thirst for wealth, but if men should take these moralists at their word, and leave off aiming to be rich, the moralists would rush to rekindle at all hazards this love of power in the peo. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell. - Bertrand Russell

The English (I cannot speak of the Scots) are moralistic, and have made moralizing their discipline since the reformation. They like to be told what to think, and their literary heroes are moralists. - Howard Barker

The Christian doctrine of sin in its classical form offends both rationalists and moralists by maintaining the seemingly absurd position that man sins inevitably and by a fateful necessity but that he is nevertheless to be held responsible for actions which are prompted by an ineluctable [inescapable] fate. - Reinhold Niebuhr

Punctuality is a quality the need of which is bound up with social co-operation. It has nothing to do with the relation of the soul to God, or with mystic insight, or with any of the matters with which the more elevated and spiritual moralists are co. - Bertrand Russell

Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil. - Mark Twain

Leave those vain moralists, my friend, and return to the depth of your soul: that is where you will always rediscover the source of the sacred fire which so often inflamed us with love of the sublime virtues; that is where you will see the eternal image of true beauty, the contemplation of which inspires us with a holy enthusiasm. - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I became a virtuoso of deceit. It wasn't pleasure I was after, it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralists to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with. And, in the end, I distilled everything down to one wonderfully simple principle: win or die. - Christopher Hampton

For over two thousand years it has been the custom among earnest moralists to decry happiness as something degraded and unworthy. - Bertrand Russell