Find the perfect quote to float your boat. Shmoop breaks down key quotations from An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Morality and Ethics Quotes
What is honorable, what is fair, what is becoming, what is noble, what is generous, takes possession of the heart, and animates us to embrace and maintain it. What is intelligible, what is evident,...
Principles Quotes
Had nature made no such distinction, founded on the original constitution of the mind, the words, honourable and shameful, lovely and odious, noble and despicable, had never had place in any langua...
Justice and Judgment Quotes
Is it any crime, after a shipwreck, to seize whatever means or instrument of safety one can lay hold of, without regard to former limitations of property? (III.I.8)
Society and Class Quotes
Who sees not […] that whatever is produced or improved by a man's art or industry ought, for ever, to be secured to him, in order to give encouragement to such useful habits and accomplishments?...
Rules and Order Quotes
When any man, even in political society, renders himself by his crimes, obnoxious to the public, he is punished by the laws in his goods and person; that is, the ordinary rules of justice are, with...
Compassion and Forgiveness Quotes
Reduce a person to solitude, and he loses all enjoyment, except either of the sensual or speculative kind; and that because the movements of his heart are not forwarded by correspondent movements i...
Foolishness and Folly Quotes
Suppose [...] that it should be a virtuous man's fate to fall into the society of ruffians, remote from the protection of laws and government; what conduct must he embrace in that melancholy situat...
Strength and Skill Quotes
When Pericles, the great Athenian statesman and general, was on his death-bed, his surrounding friends [...] began to indulge their sorrow for their expiring patron, by enumerating his great qualit...