A Quote by Maria Edgeworth

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.

Maria Edgeworth

Quote Topics

Escape Habit Minds Moral Power Predestination Species Weak Weak Minds Which

Quote Author

Maria Edgeworth
Irish - Writer
January 1, 1767 - May 22, 1849

You do anything long enough to escape the habit of living until the escape becomes the habit.

David Ryan

This is one of the two great labyrinths into which human minds are drawn: the question of free will versus predestination.

Neal Stephenson

Faced with today's problems and disappointments , many people will try to escape from their responsibility. Escape in selfishness, escape in sexual pleasure, escape in drugs, escape in violence, escape in indifference and cynical attitudes. I propose to you the option of love, which is the opposite of escape.

Pope John Paul II

"Judge not, that ye be not judge"... is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself. There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accesory to the torture and murder of his victims. The moral principle to adopt... is: "Judge, and be prepared to be judged."

Ayn Rand

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

James Russell Lowell

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Wallace Stegner

The evolutionary vision is agnostic in regard to systems in the universe of greater complexity than those of which human beings have clear knowledge. It recognizes aesthetic, moral, and religious ideas and experiences as a species, in this case of mental structures or of images, which clearly interacts with other species in the world's great' ecosystem.

Kenneth E. Boulding

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

Terry Pratchett

Unlike the pattern which seems to prevail in the rest of life, in the human species the weak not only survive but often triumph over the strong. The self-hatred inherent in the weak unlocks energies far more formidable then those mobilized by an ordinary struggle for existence.

Eric Hoffer

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Lord Acton

Novels do not force their fair readers to sin, they only instruct them how to sin; the consequences of which are fully detailed, and not in a way calculated to seduce any but weak but weak minds; few of their heroines are happily disposed of.

Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann

Society cannot escape what is essentially a moral question: When does human life deserve legal protection from the state? And society certainly cannot escape this dilemma by denying that it is fundamentally a moral issue, no matter what position one chooses.

Blase J. Cupich

Power over seems to be driving our very young species into a ditch because it's from an old competitive, "there may not be enough" kind of framework of scarcity. Power with is thinking abundantly as opposed to fearfully. Power with is hopefully where we're going - and where we need to go as a species in order to survive.

Peter Buffett

Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little, you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement: we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which could have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.

Arthur Helps

The Declaration has a moral power which is of enormous weight and influence. The statement of the rights represent a goal, or a standard, to which every man can look and with which he can compare what he in fact enjoys. The fact that no country was prepared to vote against the Declaration indicates its compelling moral force.