Quotes About Morality

Ill-considered but well-intentioned actions do more good that actions that are well-considered but cruel.

Nobody can be forced to commit an act of villainy. You can't push anybody into the mud; people always step into it themselves.

abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology.

Esto es lo que me pasó a mí. Pensé que tenía normas. Yo creía en mis absolutos. Lo hice para la mayoría de las situaciones. Entonces no lo hice. Conforme pasó el tiempo, mi mundo se volvió gris y mis absolutos se oscurecieron. El bien y el mal se disolvieron en lo que sabía que tenía que hacer.

As a scientist, I can not help feeling that all religions are on a tottering foundation. None is perfect or inspired. The idea that a good God would send people to a burning hell is utterly damnable to me. I don't want to have anything to do with such a God.

I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture.

We do not become righteous by doing righteous deed but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.

We refuse to have our conscience bound by any work or law, so that by doing this or that we should be righteous, or leaving this or that undone we should be damned.

The works of the righteous would be mortal sins if they would not be feared as mortal sins by the righteous themselves out of pious fear of God.

The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.

I greatly fear that the universities, unless they teach the Holy Scriptures diligently and impress them on the young students, are wide gates to hell.

It cannot, indeed, be denied, that a good man is more worthy of love than a bad one.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than to do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha's eightfold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.

Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Do not think that you can fight corruption without while you let corruption fester within.

There can be no virtue without temptation; for virtue is victory over temptation.

An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.

A bad God is worse than no God at all.

We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.

It is in an especial degree the tendency of the present age to deal only with tangible truths. Reason is the highpriest of the Nineteenth Century. It knows only the phenomena which the senses report to it. Its philosophy scouts the aphorism of Pascal, " The heart has reasons of its own that the reason knows not of." It tries every teaching by scientific tests; weighs moral truths in the apothecary's scales; sends divine and unseen realities to the chemists to be analyzed and tested.

Modern education includes morality; therefore the modern child seeks only entertainment in its wonder-tales and gladly dispenses with all disagreeable incident.

My mother is bold in her caused," George said. "We have never had a runaway slave come to our door, but I too would help him. My mother and I were forced to leave North Carolina when we freed our slaves. The anger our former neighbors and friends turned on us told us much. When a person does what is right, it stirs the rage of those who will not turn from doing the same evil.