Secular Ethics Quotes

#1. If you have religious faith, very good, you can add on secular ethics, then religious belief, add on it, very good. But even those people who have no interest about religion, okay, it's not religion, but you can train through education.

Dalai Lama

#2. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#3. I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law.

Aristotle.

#4. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day.

Sam Lipsyte

#5. Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

John Zerzan

#6. It is our commitment to wholeness that matters, the willingness to unfold in every deep aspect of our being.

Jack Kornfield

#7. Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you,
will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others,
or to diminish something of their pains.

Jeremy Bentham

#8. There comes a time in our lives when what we know becomes less important than what we love. And that what we love, when all is said and done, might be the most important of all things.

Dan Krzyzkowski

#9. What has life given me? The beginning is fire, the end is a heap of ashes, and between the end and the beginning lies all the pain in the world.

Francis Marion Crawford

#10. As you say of yourself, I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us.
[Letter to William Short, 31 October 1819]

Thomas Jefferson

#11. In charity to all mankind, bearing no malice or ill will to any human being, and even compassionating those who hold in bondage their fellow men, not knowing what they do.

John Quincy Adams

#12. Secular humanism is avowedly non-religious. It is a eupraxsophy (good practical wisdom), which draws its basic principles and ethical values from science, ethics, and philosophy.

Paul Kurtz

#13. A compensation is something which does not quite compensate ...

Frances Parkinson Keyes

#14. Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.

Thomas Paine

#15. Mars is the only place in the solar system where it's possible for life to become multi-planetarian.

Elon Musk

#16. Make not, when you work a deed of shame, The scoundrel's plea, 'My forbears did the same.

Al-Ma'arri

#17. You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust ... you owe me awe.

Thomas Harris

#18. Love and trust aren't the same thing.

Katharine McGee

#19. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#20. We ought so to behave to one another as to avoid making enemies of our friends, and at the same time to make friends of our enemies.

Pythagoras