Top 67 Moral Beauty Quotes
#1. Literature isn't a moral beauty contest. Its power arises from the authority and audacity with which the impersonation is pulled off; the belief it inspires is what counts.
Philip Roth
#2. If the contemplation, even of inanimate beauty, is so delightful; if it ravishes the senses, even when the fair form is foreign tous: What must be the effects of moral beauty? And what influence must it have, when it embellishes our own mind, and is the result of our own reflection and industry?
David Hume
#3. Unfortunately, moral beauty in art - like physical beauty in a person - is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.
Susan Sontag
#4. I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
Walt Whitman
#5. And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.
Joseph Conrad
#6. Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.
Victor Cousin
#7. There can be no fairer spectacle than that of a man, who combines the possession of moral beauty in his soul with outward beauty of form, corresponding and harmonizing with the former, because the same great pattern enters both.
Plato
#8. Moral beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just which they can not do.
R.D. Laing
#9. I have called her beautiful, because it was her moral beauty that at once attracted me. True beauty after all consists in purity of heart.
Mahatma Gandhi
#10. Physical beauty is the sign of an interior beauty, a spiritual and moral beauty which is the basis, the principle, and the unity of the beautiful.
Friedrich Schiller
#11. Beauty is a living abiding presence completely untouchable by all the devices of man, such as moral codes, creeds, intellectual analysis, games and cliches, the acquisitive instinct, or lust for anything whatsoever.
Lawren Harris
#12. It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
Roger Scruton
#13. Reading teaches us the nuances of humanity. To find the beauty of what is moral and ethical in your own actions and discover the strange subtlety of what it is to question why you should exist.
Carew Papritz
#14. It was an origin story pedaled to the world, but unlike the various creation stories of the old religions, there was no rich culture, no moral code, no beauty.
T.L. Zalecki
#16. The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#17. As the excellence of steel is strength, and the excellence of art is beauty, so the excellence of mankind is moral character.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
#18. Any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#19. If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
Oscar Wilde
#20. Art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.
Oscar Wilde
#21. True beauty is not related to what color your hair is or what color your eyes are. True beauty is about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass.
Ellen DeGeneres
#22. The most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth.
Anthony Ashley Cooper
#23. Moral excellence is an ornament for personal beauty; righteous conduct, for high birth; success for learning; and proper spending for wealth.
Chanakya
#24. Christ does not dress up a moral picture, and ask you to observe its beauty. He only tells you how to live; and the most beautiful characters the world has ever seen, have been those who received and lived these precepts without once conceiving their beauty.
Horace Bushnell
#25. How was it that destruction could be so beautiful? Was there something in the scale of it? Was there some shadow in people, lusting for it? Or was it just a coincidental combination of the elements, the final proof that beauty has no moral dimension?
Kim Stanley Robinson
#26. Our task is not to protest the world into a certain moral conformity, but to attract the world to the saving beauty of Christ.
Brian Zahnd
#28. The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.
David Hume
#29. Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion.
Jean-Luc Godard
#30. True beauty is in the mind; and the expression of the features depends more upon the moral nature than most persons are accustomed to think.
Arthur Frederick Saunders
#31. The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
John Ruskin
#32. ....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.
G.E. Moore
#33. Sufism is not a religion or a philosophy, it is neither deism nor atheism, nor is it a moral, nor a special kind of mysticism, being free from the usual religious sectarianism. If ever it could be called a religion, it would only be as a religion of love, harmony, and beauty.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#34. He that sees the beauty of holiness or true moral good ,sees the greatest and most important thing in the world.
Jonathan Edwards
#36. It aligns the cannibals with their real modern counterparts: those who eat "health" diets for self-improvement or worldly success or moral superiority or enhanced beauty or personal purity. Strangely, cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
#37. Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic-in a word, moral-undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind's noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage.
George Will
#38. It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.
T. S. Eliot
#39. The day knowledge was preferred to wisdom and mere usefulness to beauty ... Only a moral revolution
not a social or a political revolution
only a moral revolution would lead man back to his lost truth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. Fashion is neither moral or immoral, but it is for rebuilding the morale.
Karl Lagerfeld
#42. There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.
Tadeusz Borowski
#43. Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.
Oscar Wilde
#44. The eye which can appreciate the naked and absolute beauty of a scientific truth is far more rare than that which is attracted by a moral one.
Henry David Thoreau
#45. Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
George Bancroft
#46. Truth is congenial to man. Moral truth is then most consummate when, like beauty, it commends itself without argument. The righteous not only does right, but loves to do right.
Francis William Newman
#47. By means of trees, wildlife could be conserved, pollution decreased, and the beauty of our landscapes enhanced. This is the way, or at least one of the ways, to spiritual, moral, and cultural regeneration.
E.F. Schumacher
#48. When trees mature, it is fair and moral that they are cut for man's use, as they would soon decay and return to the earth. Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth.
George Nakashima
#49. Beauty, whether moral or natural, is felt, more properly than perceived.
David Hume
#50. There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. - Francis Bacon, Essays, Civil and Moral, Of Beauty
Scott Westerfeld
#51. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'
that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.
Timothy Keller
#53. The gayety of life, like the beauty and the moral worth of life, is a saving grace, which to ignore is folly, and to destroy is crime. There is no more than we need; there is barely enough to go round.
Agnes Repplier
#54. There are no moral lectures in 'Lookaway, Lookaway;' there aren't even any lessons. But there is passion. It is a work that hides its craft but never its beauty, that is ambitious but never pretentious, that does not sacrifice nuance for power or power for nuance.
Cathleen Schine
#55. In love we do not think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone, with beauty, excite love.
William Hazlitt
#56. It is probably a pity that every citizen of each state cannot visit all the others, to see the differences, to learn what we have in common, and come back with a richer, fuller understanding of America - in all its beauty, in all its dignity, in all its strength, in support of moral principles.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#57. I'm so grateful that I was raised by a mother who really instilled in me that my moral compass and achievements all had to come from a real place that had nothing to do with my beauty or how I looked. That was very big for her.
Kristen Stewart
#58. The moral sense reappears today with the same morning newness that has been from of old the fountain of beauty and strength. You say there is no religion now. 'Tis like saying in rainy weather, There is no sun, when at that moment we are witnessing one of its superlative effects.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#59. Stargazing is one of the most profoundly human things one can do. But perhaps we must more frequently tear ourselves away from the mystery and beauty of the starry heavens above, and rather inspect, admire and foster the moral law within.
Jack Gleeson
#60. What a man is: that is to say, personality, in the widest sense of the word; under which are included health, strength, beauty, temperament, moral character, intelligence, and education.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#61. I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?
James Thomson
#62. It was Brighton. She made me fucking insane. Her beauty and absolute perfection dissolved any moral boundaries that may have existed within me.
A. Zavarelli
#63. Moral education, as I understand it, is not about inculcating obedience to law or cultivating self-virtue, it is rather about finding within us an ever-increasing sense of the worth of creation. It is about how we can develop and deepen our intuitive sense of beauty and creativity.
Andrew Linzey
#64. I look for three things. Number One is does the film promote the beauty and dignity of the human person? Number Two is does this film promote the transcendent moral order? And three, does it promote natural affection?
Jason Jones
#65. Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.
Oscar Wilde
#66. We must remember that possession of physical beauty can easily weaken the moral faculty.
Frank Tallis
#67. We each have a moral obligation to conserve and preserve beauty in this world; there is none to waste.
Robert A. Heinlein
