Character Quote by Samuel Johnson

“When a man’s love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that…

— Matthew Scully

. . . as to moral feeling, this supposed special sense, the appeal to it is indeed superficial when those who cannot think believe…

— Immanuel Kant

“When any individual or collection of individuals acts in disobedience to the moral order, short-term gratification may be experienced; but such behavior produces an…

— Ronald H. Nash

“as well as over potentially ennobling or morally beatific states like sympathy, melancholia, and shame (the emotions given the most attention in literary criticism’s…

— Sianne Ngai

For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow…

— Anonymous

Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a…

— Matthew Scully

“Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.”

— Aristotle

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.

— Louise Erdrich

“A man's moral character may be completely sapped; that is the dreadful part of it.”

— Henrik Ibsen

The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves. They are…

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

A story with a moral appended is like the bill of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate…

— O. Henry

“writing about something was not the moral equivalent of doing it,”

— Ralph Keyes