Quotes About Morality

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

Let me make no bones about it: I write from the standpoint of Christian orthodoxy. Nothing is more repulsive to me than the idea of myself setting up a little universe of my own choosing and propounding a little immoralistic message. I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas.

I can smell the sin on your breath.

Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

The Church's stand on birth control is the most absolutely spiritual of all her stands and with all of us being materialists at heart, there is little wonder that it causes unease. I wish various fathers would quit trying to defend it by saying that the world can support 40 billion. I will rejoice the day when they say: This is right whether we all rot on top of each other or not, dear children, as we certainly may. Either practice restraint or be prepared for crowding...

Does one's integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.

Poorly written novels -- no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters -- are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

I guess a good man IS hard to find!

Virtue must be the only vigorous thing in our lives. Sin is large and stale. You can never finish easting it nor ever digest it. It has to be vomited.

The virtue of hope, in Enoch, was made up of two parts suspicion and one part lust.

You can do one thing or you can do another, kill a man or take a tire off his car, because sooner or later you're going to forget what it was you done and just be punished for it.

She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn't have the brains to avoid evil without it.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live, and so far as he is concerned, a living deformed character is acceptable and a dead whole one is not.

Mrs. May winced. She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

The fiction writer has to engage in a continual examination of conscience. He has to be aware of the freak in himself.

Lady," The Misfit said, looking beyond her far into the woods, "there never was a body that give the undertaker a tip.

She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.

Sin is a great thing as long as it's recognized. It leads a good many people to God who wouldn't get there otherwise.

She would have been a good woman if there had been somebody to shoot her every day of her life.

She would have been a good woman if there had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.

His heart constricted with a repulsion for himself so clear and intense that he gasped for breath. He had stuffed his own emptiness with good works like a glutton.

She would have been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life

In the cross of Christ, we see something revolutionary, something that undercuts not just conventional morality but also religious distinctions across the board. Christ has died for the ungodly, the unrighteous