Quotes About Integrity

Don't expect your success to carry you in life. Rather, let your success be carried by your character.

People become leaders when they make the decision not to sacrifice their principles on the altar of convenience or compromise.

Most of what I say is complete truth. My edit button is broken.

rationality has less to do with following scholarly procedures and more to do with becoming a saint.

Sport-das ist eine Sache. Aber sportlich das ist jemand, der die Spielregeln beachtet.

If you take from a theory only the conclusions you like and discard the rest, you are using the theory as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support rather than illumination.

Whenever you see, in an official lectionary, the command to omit two or three verses, you can normally be sure that they contain words of judgment. Unless, of course, they are about sex.

Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.

Beauty matters, dare I say, almost as much as spirituality and justice.

It is one thing to insist on walking south when the compass is pointing north. But to "fix" the compass so that it tells you that the wrong way is the right way is far, far worse. You can correct a mistake. But once you tell yourself it wasn't a mistake there's no way back.

those who invoke YHWH as the judge of all must themselves live in the light of that coming judgment.

Virtue, after all, isn't just about morals in the sense of "knowing the standards to live up to" or "knowing which rules you're supposed to keep." Virtue, as we have already seen, is about the whole of life, not just the specifically "moral" choices.

Holiness is multidimensional.

How would you describe a mature person?

There is a danger in Christians supposing that they simply have to be flaky, awkward, against the government all the time, continually doing things upside down and inside out. Some people of course seem to be born that way, and use the gospel imperative as an excuse for foisting their own cussedness or arrogance on everyone else.

Anyone who has worked within biblical scholarship knows, or ought to know, that we biblical scholars come to the text with just as many interpretative strategies and expectations as anyone else, and that integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones.

We've had enough of pragmatists and self-seeking risk-takers. We need people of character.

My third note is that when we therefore use scripture in little bits, cut off from their proper context and made to dance to our tunes instead, all sorts of doubts can creep in, like weeds among the wheat.

make sure we are doing justice and honour to scripture itself, rather than simply using it within schemes of our own making.

We are saved not as souls but as wholes. (All

When you're jolted, what spills out is whatever is filling you." When you're suddenly put to the test and don't have time to think about how you're coming across, your real nature will come out. That's why character needs to go all the way through: whatever fills you will spill out. And it's up to you to do something about it.

We cannot and must not soften the blow; we cannot and must not pretend that evil isn't that bad after all.

your praying and your preaching should be of the same length. You don't want to find yourself limping, with one leg shorter than the other. God works as a result of prayer and faithfulness, not technique and cleverness. But

The generous one-dimensional desire to be a hero, to 'do the right thing', needs to be rounded out with the equally generous willingness to restrain apparent heroism when it might itself bring disaster.