G.E. Moore > Quotes

“The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.”
― George Edward Moore

“A great artist is always before his time or behind it.”
― George Edward Moore

“...fiction is as useful as truth, for giving us matter, upon which to exercise the judgment of value.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“If i am asked 'what is good? my answer is that good is good, and that is the end of the matter. Or if I am asked 'How is good to be defined?' my answer is that it cannot be defined, and that is all I have to say about it”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal...”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“Moral conduct,or duty,is defined as the obligation to select that action which will achieve more good than any alternative action....”
― George E. Moore

“Egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good--that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is--an absolute contradiction! No more complete and thorough refutation of any theory could be desired.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“For it is the business of Ethics, I must insist, not only to obtain true results, but also to find valid reasons for them.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“....it seems to me that a pleasurable Contemplation of Beauty has certainly an immeasurably greater value than mere Consciousness of Pleasure.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“Philosophical questions are so difficult, the problems they raise are so complex, that no one can fairly expect, now, any more than in the past, to win more than a very limited assent.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer.”
― G E Moore, Ethics

“The expression 'self-evident' means properly that the proposition so called is evident or true, by itself alone; that it is not an inference from some proposition other than itself. The expression does not mean that the proposition is true, because it is evident to you or me or all mankind, because in other words in appears to us to be true. That a proposition appears to be true can never be a valid argument that true it really is.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How?. By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand 'Here is one hand' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left 'and here is another.' And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things. And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is
no need to multiply examples. But did I prove just now that two human hands were then in existence? I do want to insist that I did; that the proof which I gave was a perfectly rigorous one; and that it is perhaps impossible to give a better or more rigorous proof of anything whatever.”
― George Edward Moore, Philosophical Papers

“Good, then, is indefinable....”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“If indeed good were a feeling....then it would exist in time. But that is why to call it so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. It will always remain pertinent to ask, whether the feeling itself is good; and if do, then good cannot itself be identical with any feeling.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“It was pointed out that by "natural" there might here be meant either "normal" or "necessary", and that neither the "normal" nor the "necessary" could be seriously supposed to be either always good or the only good things.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“We must not, therefore, be frightened by the assertion that a thing is natural into the admission that it is good; good does not, by definition, mean anything that is natural; and it is therefore always an open question whether anything that is natural is good.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“But is it so obvious that the normal must be good? Is it really obvious that health, for instance, is good? Was the excellence of Socrates or of Shakespeare normal? Was it not rather abnormal, extraordinary? It is, I think, obvious in the first place, that not all that is good is normal; that, on the contrary, the abnormal is often better than the normal: peculiar excellence, as well as peculiar viciousness, must obviously be not normal but abnormal.”
― G E Moore, Ethics

“...if good is defined as something else, it is then impossible either to prove that any other definition is wrong or even to deny such definition.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“He [Wittgenstein] said that the "new subject" [new philosophy] consisted in "something like putting in order our notions as to what can be said about the world", and compared this to the tidying up of a room where you have to move the same object several times before you can get the room really tidy.”
― G. E. Moore

“To search for 'unity' and 'system', at the expense of truth, is not, I take it, the proper business of philosophy, however universally it may have been the practice of philosophers. And that all the truths of the Universe possess to one another all the various relations, which may be meant by unity, can only be legitimately asserted, when we have carefully distinguished those various relations and discovered what those truths are.”
― G.E. Moore, Principia Ethica

“I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How?. By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand 'Here is one hand' and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left 'and here is another.' And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things. And if, by doing this, I have proved ipso facto the existence of external things, you will all see that I can also do it now in numbers of other ways: there is no need to multiply examples. But did I prove just now that two human hands were then in existence? I do want to insist that I did; that the proof which I gave was a perfectly rigorous one; and that it is perhaps impossible to give a better or more rigorous proof of anything whatever.”
― George Edward Moore, Philosophical Papers