Quotes About Morality

A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill?

Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?

Casy said solemnly, This here ol' man jus' lived a life an' just died out of it. I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters. An' now his dead, an' that don't matter...

Suppose it were true—Adam, the most rigidly honest man it was possible to find, living all his life on stolen money. Lee laughed to himself—now this second will, and Aron, whose purity was a little on the self-indulgent side, living all his life on the profits from a whorehouse. Was this some kind of joke or did things balance so that if one went too far in one direction an automatic slide moved on the scale and the balance was re-established?

Evil must constantly re-spawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face. While virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions

Virtue is venerable as nothing else in this world is.

Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil.

The preacher rose high on his elbow. Law changes, he said, but 'got to's' go on. You got the right to do what you got to do.

No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us. What a great burden of guilt men have!' Samuel said to Adam, 'And you have tried to take it all.' Lee said, 'So do I, so does everyone. We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.

Its inhabitant are, as the man once said, whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men, and he would have meant the same thing. Quoted by Richard Wagamese in Ragged Company

Well, suppose there's a slight doubt that the boy should be in the army and we send him and he gets killed." "I see. Is it responsibility or blame that bothers you?" "I don't want blame." "Sometimes responsibility is worse. It doesn't carry any pleasant egotism.

Here is individual responsibility and the invention of conscience. You can if you will but it is up to you. This little story(from the Bible)turns out to be one of the most profound in the world. I always felt it was,but now I know it is.

There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?

Possibly the deep feeling is that if people learn to eat one another the food supply would be so generous and so available that no one would be either safe or hungry.

Will liked to live so that no one could find fault with him, and to do that he had to live as nearly like other people as possible.

To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish.

If two generous paths branch from the highroad of life and only one can be followed, who is to judge which is best?

No matter how weak and negative a good man is, he has as many sins on him as he can bear.

And when one of our successful men had what he needed or wanted, he reassumed his virtue as easily as changing his shirt, and for all one could see, he took no hurt from his derelictions, always assuming that he didn't get caught.

The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

in him kindness and conscience are so large that they are almost faults.

If something was untrue and you didn't know it, that was error. But if you knew a true thing and changed it to a false thing, both you and it were loathsome.

a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether he is doing right or wrong.