Quotes About Morality

When a man's over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?

Hen nights should be banned. You're honour-bound to behave atrociously, then feel terribly ashamed afterwards. (This Charming Man)

Looking straight into Rochelle's eyes he adds, I don't cave in to temptation.

If we really desire a moral answer to the Holocaust, we do everything in our power to create a world in which it could never happen again. As

If we're morally responsible for monitoring our own souls, then we're morally responsible, as well, for monitoring the soul of our nation.

What is going on in America today is not just a political contest; it is a spiritual contest.

En la sociedad siempre triunfa la hipocresía!

For one thing she [Alice Hayward] possessed that passionate love of abstract justice which has become more a woman's than a man's trait, in our modern civilisation.

I know that many men are living in the tangles of sin, but too weak of will to break the net in which they have become voluntarily imprisoned.

The five dollars I gave her would never reach her. I knew that: because I wanted my class to think me good for giving it. Spiritual Pride the nuns called it, a Sin of Intention, sister to the Sin of Omission, which was the price for what you hadn't done but thought. Sometimes I prayed so hard for God to materialize at the foot of my bed it would start to happen; then I'd beg it to stop, and it would.

Caring for language is a moral issue. Caring for one another is not entirely separable from caring for words. Words are entrusted to us as equipment for our life together, to help us survive, guide, and nourish one another. We need to take the metaphor of nourishment seriously in choosing what we feed on in our hearts, and in seeking to make our conversation with each other life-giving.

When you're taught to love everyone, to love your enemies, what value does that put on love?

I was very apprehensive, mostly because I didn't want to get caught. By now, I had begun to feel removed from the everyday world of morality. Guilt had become more a fear of getting caught than any sense of right or wrong.

The balance between good and evil, and the choices we make between them, are probably the single most important aspects shaping our personalities and humanity.

Harm to you is not harm to me in the strict sense, and that is a great part of the problem. He could knock me down the stairs and I would have worked out the theology for forgiving him before I reached the bottom. But if he harmed you in the slightest way, I'm afraid theology would fail me.

Thinking about hell doesn't help me live the way I should. I believe this is true for most people. And thinking that other people might go to hell just feels evil to me, like a very grave sin. So I don't want to encourage anyone else to think that way either.

Avoid transgression. How's that for advice.

morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never knoew what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spared the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing

I believe it is only prudent to make a very high estimate of human nature, first of all in order to contain the worst impulses of human nature, and then to liberate its best impulses.

You are not good for your own sake. That probably isn't even possible. You are good as a courtesy to everyone around you. Keeping a promise or breaking it, telling the truth or lying, matters to those around you. So there is good you can do and always do again. You do not have to believe you are good in order to act well in any specific case. You never lose that option.

She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.

I thought he made one interesting point in here somewhere, though. He said the seriousness of American Christianity was called into question by our treatment of the Negro. It seems to me there is something to be said for that idea.

Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all...