Quotes About Integrity

No matter what your work is, says Emerson, let it be yours; no matter if you are a tinker or preacher, blacksmith or president, let what you are doing be organic, let it be in your bones, and you open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you.

Every time we do wrong, every time we depart from the truth, every time we commit a dishonest, unworthy act, do a mean, contemptible thing, we lessen the Omnipotent grip upon us, and then we become a prey to all sorts of fears, apprehensions, dreads, and doubts.

We believe in a man in proportion to his immovableness from principle, the fixity of his faith in his mission. The man who is loosely attached to his life work, who can be easily turned aside from his life purpose, is not much of a man.

The time will come when human drones will be ostracized from society as nobodies, as thieves of honest men's efforts, thieves of the results of honest men's labor. The coming civilization will not tolerate these thieves of society, these lazy vagabonds who do nothing but steal the products of their labor and demoralize society by their vicious example.

Agassiz would not lecture at five hundred dollars a night, because he had no time to make money.

There is something inside of a man which protests against doing that which tends to injure another, that which does not square with his God nature, with the best thing in him; that which is not working in response to his highest aspiration.

If someone offered to purchase a large percentage of your life power you would not think of selling it, even for a fabulous sum.

You cannot take advantage of God's child and have God for a partner, because you will then be working against Him instead of with Him.

There is a very close connection between a fine, strong, clean physique and a fine, strong, clean character. A man who allows himself to become careless in regard to the one will, in spite of himself, fall away in the other.

Shakespeare says: God has given you one face and you make yourselves another.

Purity is power because it means integrity of thought, integrity of conduct. It means wholeness.

Read or Starve. Show me a man who has made fifty thousand dollars, and I will show you in that man an equivalent of energy, attention to detail, trustworthiness, punctuality, professional knowledge, good address, common sense, and other marketable qualities.

I will remember this, thought Ender, when I am defeated. To keep dignity, and give honor where it's due, so that defeat is not disgrace. And I hope I don't have to do it often.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

You made them hate me. Said Ender So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be. -Graff

Any decent person who knows what warfare is can never go into battle with a whole heart.

Good people aren't good because they never cause harm to others. They're good because they treat others the best way they know how, with the understanding that they have.

Colonel Graff: We won! That's all that matters. Ender Wiggin: No. The way we win matters.

Thanks from keeping me from being a liar, said Nikolai. What? About your having diarrhea. For you I'd get dysentery. Now that's friendship.

Sometimes good people have to do terrible things.

I'm not a liar, sir,' she said. 'No, I'm sure you sincerely become whatever it is you're pretending to be.

Sometimes, what's right is not peaceful or passive. What matters is that you do not hide from the consequences. You bear what must be borne.

When the messenger won't tell you what the hell the message is, my trigger finger gets twitchy. Dismissed.

Asking a man if he could be trusted was like asking an unwed girl if she was a virgin. The question mattered, but the asking of it was gross insult.