Quotes About Rightness

The claim that values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world, is meant to include not only moral goodness, which might be most naturally equated with moral value, but also other things that could be more loosely called moral values or disvalues—rightness and wrongness, duty, obligation, an action's being rotten and contemptible, and so on. It also includes non-moral values, notably aesthetic ones, beauty and various kinds of artistic merit.

I shrugged, annoyed. How could I expect him to understand the philosophers I read? I expected his derision. And that was why I tried to avoid conversations about my research, I thought with triumphant self-pity. That was why I was less and less able to have conversations with people outside of my profession. I felt miserable, but also satisfied at having my rightness proven.

Bob was not a young man, and he knew about loss. He knew the quiet that arrived, the blinding force of panic, and he knew that each loss brought with it some odd, barely acknowledged sense of release. He was not an especially contemplative person, and he did not dwell on this. But by October there were many days when the swell of rightness, loose-limbedness, and gentle gravity came to him. It recalled to him being a child, when he found one day he could finally color within the lines.

On our part there must be the recognition of the rightness and need of fasting, the willingness for the self-discipline involved, and the exercise of heart before God; but in the final analysis the initiative is His.

But some things, no matter how unlikely, are just supposed to happen. You know what I mean. Some things just smack of the future and feel part of an overarching rightness.

When Mr. Dove had once been positive, no man on earth was more positive. It behoved him, therefore, to be right when he was positive; and though whether wrong or right he was equally stubborn, it must be acknowledged that he was seldom proved to be wrong

Hence while in respect of its substance and the definition that states what it really is in essence virtue is the observance of the mean, in point of excellence and rightness it is an extreme.

The proud man, then, is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short.

If what you plan is just, why do it in the dark?

There are many pointers in the Bible concerning the rightness, the goodness, the beauty, the justice, the preciousness of racial harmony and diversity.

and will therefore send the man forth from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend.

The one cure for any organism, is to be set right--to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A

In a time of danger, the person sounding the paranoid continual alarm will eventually be right. A voice arguing for our complete rightness and the complete wrongness of our enemies, a voice constantly broadening the definition of enemy, relieves us of the burden of living with ambiguity.

There is no man more dangerous, in a position of power, than he who refuses to accept as a working truth the idea that all a man does should make for rightness and soundness, that even the fixing of a tariff rate must be moral.

The form of the poem, in other words, is crucial to poetry's power to do the thing which always is and always will be to poetry's credit: the power to persuade that vulnerable part of our consciousness of its rightness in spite of the evidence of wrongness all around it, the power to remind us that we are hunters and gatherers of values, that our very solitudes and distresses are creditable, in so far as they, too, are an earnest of our veritable human being.

...sensation of rightness, of saying the right thing atthe right time to the right person, that too-raresensation of having the right thing to say and believing it.

War is a part of human nature, and we Japanese are human. But we have never fought, we have certainly never built weapons of mass destruction, to convince the world of the rightness of an idea. It took America and its bastard twin, communism, to do that." He

The rightness of things is generally revealed in retrospect, and you're unlikely to know in advance what is right and wrong in a story that has not yet been written.

There will be a rightness and an appropriateness to it.

so great was his feeling of rightness that he could ignore the dark shadow of the future.

In math, you're either right or you're wrong.

The passive aggressive arguer comes armed with tricky tactics. They cannot take the risk that they might be wrong: their self-esteem is too intertwined with their opinions. It is more important to affirm their rightness, and sense of superiority, than to arrive at the truth.

Gideon held my gaze as he said, "Good-bye, Cary," then powered off my phone and set it on the counter. His hair was damp and he wore black pajama bottoms that hung low on his hips. The sight of him hit me hard, reminding me of all that I stood to lose when I lost him—the breathless anticipation and desire, the comfort and intimacy, the ephemeral sense of rightness that made everything worthwhile.

From this experience also, a faith arises to carry back to a human world of small lusts and deceitful pettiness. A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.