A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues Quotes

“It is better to be too honest to be polite than to be too polite to be honest!”
― André Comte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life

“Don’t say bad words; don’t interrupt people; don’t shove; don’t steal; don’t lie. To the child, all these prohibitions appear identical (“It’s not nice”). The distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic will come only later, and gradually. Politeness thus precedes morality, or rather, morality at first is nothing more than politeness: a compliance with usage and its established rules, with the normative play of appearances—a compliance with the world and the ways of the world.”
― Andre Compte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life

“Kant provides a more helpful answer. For him, these first semblances of virtue can be explained in terms of discipline, in other words, as a product of external constraint: what the child cannot do on his own because he has no instinct for it “others have to do … for him,” and in this way “one generation educates the next.”
― Andre Compte-Sponville, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues: The Uses of Philosophy in Everyday Life

“To philosophize is to think without the benefit of proof (if proof exists, it is no longer philosophy),
which is not to say that any thought and all ways of thinking are, philosophically speaking, equally valid.”
― Comte-Sponville André, Kleine verhandeling over de grote deugden