Quotes About Morality

All that beauty . . . and Daggrepont, ugliness personified, a fat, grotesque pouch of greed, avarice shining in his magnified eyes . . .

Which do you think would be worse? Tippen asked. Knowing you're a son of a bitch or knowing you fathered one?

Some days life just sucked when you were a decent human being.

You can go anywhere in a book. Be anyone. And life has to make sense in a book. Real life doesn't have to make sense. In real life good people can turn out to be bad people, and bad people can get away with murder...and worse. I'll take a good book over that any day.

In short, this or that behavior wasn't good because scripture said so. Scripture mandated this or that behavior because it was good, and if it was already good before scripture said so, then it was good for some reason inherent to itself, some reason that reason could discover.

I'm not so fond of people myself, Evvy, but I took my vows for a reason. There are two classes of people in the world, the destroyers and the builders. I want to build, not destroy. You need to ask yourself who you're going to be.

If we pick a fight, then we're just as bad as them. Combat should be used just to help people who can't defend themselves, period. Well, if I don't fight back and they pound on me, then I'm one of the people I should be defending.

Would I serve you or (Prince) Jon stolen goods? he asked. No, don't answer me.

Alanna didn't approve of lying, but in a pinch a lie was sometimes better than the truth.

Ozorne, please don't let him try to make me into a battle mage. I wish you'd told me that's what you wanted. Arram stopped and grabbed his friend by the arms. I won't do it. I'm not a killer. I'll never be a killer.

Only the man who wishes to be corrupted will fall into evil ways.

He deserves to die - but do you deserve to kill him?

It disgusts me," whispered Baird, "what people allow, if they think those who commit vile acts can help them to achieve some goal.

That was a monstrous thought - he KNEW it was monstrous. Yet he thought it all the same.

Explicit sin was sweeter than mere carnality.

Man is certainly free, but he is responsible for this freedom before God as before men. This responsibility is inevitably moral. In order of this morality, to be free is to protect the freedom of others and their dignities.

One would love nonetheless to know how to be a man, how to be a woman before God, in the mirror of one's own conscience, in the looks of those who surround us. One would wish to find the strength to beautify one's thoughts and to purify one's heart. It is everyone's hope and expectation to live in serenity and to plod along in transparency: the palms of the hands patiently directed towards heaven, at the heart of all this modernity.

Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner.

To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell. —BUDDHIST PROVERB

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?

Not evil. Not any more evil than the colored trees are good.Evil and good reside in the heart, not in trees and water.

And does man simply choose evil, or does he create it?...Is evil a force that swims in human blood, struggling to find its way into the heart, or is it an external possibility wanting to be formed?

Do you believe? I believe, he said softly. What do you believe? I believe that I will kill these two to save my wife and son. Belief. Something about belief mattered greatly.

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, we are the sum total of our actions. What is in our hearts does not matter.