The Moralist Quotes

#1. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.

Bertrand Russell

#2. Self-righteousness is always self-condemnatory. And self-righteousness is the preserve of the moralist.

Timothy Keller

#3. Let God be good," cried Erasmus the moralist. "Let God be God," replied Luther the theologian. Although

Timothy George

#4. But what sin is to the moralist and crime to the jurist so to the scientific man is ignorance.

Frederick Soddy

#5. Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

Walter Lippmann

#6. It becomes the moralist, too, to inquire what man might do to improve and beautify the system; what to make the stars shine more brightly, the sun more cheery and joyous, the moon more placid and content.

Henry David Thoreau

#7. Is literature better, is politics better, for having discarded the moralist and the philosopher?

G.K. Chesterton

#8. The moralist must praise heroism and condemn cruelty; but the moralist does not explain events.

Georges Lefebvre

#9. The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.

Alan Watts

#10. As the ancient commander addressed his soldiers before battle, so should the moralist speak to men in the struggle of the era.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#11. If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.

Timothy Leary

#12. To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.

Emma Goldman

#13. The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Walter Lippmann

#14. It is the habitual carriage of the umbrella that is the stamp of Respectability. Robinson Crusoe was rather a moralist than a pietist, and his leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilised mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.

Robert Louis Stevenson

#15. Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone ...

William Butler Yeats

#16. If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations ...

William Makepeace Thackeray

#17. The greatest historian should also be a great moralist. It is no proof of impartiality to treat wickedness and goodness on the same level.

Theodore Roosevelt

#18. Admiration is one of the most bewitching, enthusiastic passions of the mind; and every common moralist knows that it arises from novelty and surprise, the inseparable attendants of imposture.

William Warburton

#19. Of course I lie to people. But I lie altruistically - for our mutual good. The lie is the basic building block of good manners. That may seem mildly shocking to a moralist - but then what isn t?

Quentin Crisp

#20. There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism.

John Carroll

#21. It was rightly said of Sade that his is the work of a moralist. Erotic books are almost all alike in this respect: either they are working toward the elaboration of a revolutionary morality, or they echo the morality of their age, against which they are protesting.

Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues

#22. The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be a
solipsist.

Kedar Joshi

#23. What moralist can deny that well-bred and vicious people are much more agreeable than their virtuous counterparts? Having crimes to atone for, they provisionally solicit indulgence by showing leniency toward the defects of their judges. Thus they pass for excellent folk.

Honore De Balzac

#24. The corrupt, when found out, become especially good moralists.

Robert Payne

#25. Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.

Allen Wheelis

#26. If I am against the condition of the world, it is not because I am a moralist - it is because I want to laugh more.

Henry Miller

#27. The desperate addict is closer to the heart of grace than the devout moralist.

Tullian Tchividjian

#28. In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel - and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.

Vladimir Nabokov

#29. Someone like Einstein was quite clearly a moralist, and he had a very highly developed political vision and was very spiritual in his way, and there are many biologists and physicists of the first order who are like that.

Jonathan Miller

#30. I don't much like assuming the tone of a moralist. But the danger of baobabs is so little recognized, and the risks run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid are so considerable, that for once I am making an exception to my habitual reserve.

Antoine De Saint-Exupery

#31. The public only knows one side of [Mark Mark Twain] - the amusing part. Little does it suspect that he was a man of strong convictions upon political and social questions and a moralist of no mean order.

Andrew Carnegie

#32. Rough Johnson, the great moralist.

Lord Byron

#33. The worse one sins, the more of a moralist one becomes.

Caleb Crain

#34. I am very tolerant. I am not a moralist. I have too great a sense of the shortness of life and its temptations to rule red lines. Yet I am not so indiscriminate as you think, judging me - as you judge me - from my fluency.

Virginia Woolf