Adam Smith Quotes on Virtue
Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) — and not the more famous Wealth of Nations — supplies the moral-philosophical foundation of his thought. Sympathy — the capacity to enter imaginatively into the situation and feelings of another — is the natural mechanism through which human beings form moral judgments, and the impartial spectator is the internalized standard by which the well-formed conscience evaluates its own conduct. The four cardinal virtues for Smith are prudence, justice, beneficence, and self-command, and the framework integrates with the political economy of the Wealth of Nations: the commercial society works to general advantage only because it is sustained by the moral resources Smith analyzed in the earlier book.
Quotes
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Attributed to Adam Smith:
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
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“All for ourselves and nothing for other people seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
Chapter IV, p. 448. -
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him.”
Section I, Chap. I. -
“Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.”
Section II, Chap. III. -
Attributed to Adam Smith:
“Man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”
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“The Union was a measure from which infinite Good has been derived to this country.”
Letter to William Strahan (4 April 1760), quoted in Adam Smith, The Correspondence of Adam Smith , eds. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (1987), p. 68 -
“Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great cheerfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things then any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.”
Letter to Alexander Wedderburn 14 August 1776. The Correspondence of Adam Smith edited by E.C. Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press 1986. The Future Hope in Adam Smith’s System , Paul Oslington