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“Receive an injury rather than do one.”
Personal suffering is treated as morally preferable to becoming the person who deliberately inflicts unjust harm on another.
Source note: The Moral Sayings of Publius Syrus, maxim 5, in Darius Lyman’s 1856 English rendering; maxim order can vary across editions.
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“The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.”
Voice: Fictional character · Lord Henry Wotton
The line is a deliberately seductive paradox rather than practical advice, expressing the character’s philosophy of appetite and indulgence.
Source note: The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Lippincott magazine text, Chapter 2; Lord Henry states the temptation paradox while influencing Dorian in Basil Hallward’s garden.
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“Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice.”
The social metaphor makes justice structurally essential: Smith argues that a community may survive limited generosity but not continual mutual injury.
Source note: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part II, Section II, Chapter III; the sentence contrasts justice as society’s foundation with beneficence as its ornament.
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“The superior man is satisfied and composed; the mean man is always full of distress.”
The contrast treats composure as a feature of cultivated character rather than as freedom from all difficulty: the “superior man” is represented as settled enough not to live in continual inward distress.
Source note: The Analects of Confucius, Book VII, Chapter XXXVI, James Legge translation, Project Gutenberg #3330.
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“Virtue then is a state apt to exercise deliberate choice, being in the relative mean, determined by reason.”
Virtue is treated as a stable capacity for deliberate choice, guided by practical judgment rather than by extremes of impulse or deficiency.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter VI; the public-domain English translation defines virtue through deliberate choice and the relative mean.
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“The rules of justice are accurate in the highest degree, and admit of no exceptions or modifications, but such as may be ascertained as accurately as the rules themselves.”
Smith contrasts justice with looser virtues by arguing that its external obligations require unusually precise rules if people are to rely on one another.
Source note: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Part III discussion of the general rules of morality; Smith contrasts exact rules of justice with more flexible rules of prudence and generosity.