Quotes About Integrity

I cannot imagine a spiritual pain deeper than dying with the thought that during my sojourn on earth, I had rarely, if ever, shown up as my true self. And I cannot imagine a spiritual comfort deeper than dying with the knowledge that I had spent my brief time on this planet doing the best I could to be present as myself to my family, my friends, my community, and my world.

When I'm asked for the 'elevator speech' that sums up my work, I always respond, 'I always take the stairs, so I don't have an elevator speech. If you'd like to walk with me awhile, I'd love to talk.' I don't know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite." (40)

For the good [person] to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and narrow path compared to which his [or her] previous rectitude was flowery license.

teacher within is not the voice of conscience but of identity and integrity. It speaks not of what ought to be but of what is real for us, of what is true. It says things like, "This is what fits you and this is what doesn't"; "This is who you are and this is who you are not"; "This is what gives you life and this is what kills your spirit—or makes you wish you were dead.

The powers and principalities would hold less sway over our lives if we refused to collaborate with them. But refusal is risky, so we deny our own truth, take up lives of "self-impersonation," and betray our identities.2

During the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition that they called "soldier's heart."8 The violence that results in soldier's heart shatters a person's sense of self and community, and war is not the only setting in which violence is done: violence is done whenever we violate another's integrity. Thus we do violence in politics when we demonize the opposition or ignore urgent human needs in favor of politically expedient decisions.

How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential - in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth - when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.

The punishment imposed on us for claiming true self can never be worse than the punishment we impose on ourselves by failing to make that claim. And the converse is true as well: no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.

One dwells with God by being faithful to one's nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not. Reality-including one's own-is divine, to be not defied but honored.

the personal can never be divorced from the professional. "We teach who we are" in times of darkness as well as light. In

Be not afraid." As one who is no stranger to fear, I have had to read those words with care so as not to twist them into a discouraging counsel of perfection. "Be not afraid" does not mean we cannot have fear. Everyone has fear, and people who embrace the call to leadership often find fear abounding. Instead, the words say we do not need to be the fear we have. We do not have to lead from a place of fear, thereby engendering a world in which fear is multiplied.

A politician who brings personal integrity into leadership helps us reclaim the popular trust that distinguishes true democracy from its cheap imitations.

A fault line runs down the middle of my life, and whenever it cracks open-divorcing my words and actions from the truth I hold within-things around me get shaky and start to fall apart.

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself-and me-even as I give it away.

There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail—and may even do great damage.

One dwells with God by being faithful to one's nature. One crosses God by trying to be something one is not.

We must judge ourselves by a higher standard than effectiveness, the standard called faithfulness.

Perhaps there is a lesson here about the complexity, even duplicity, we must embrace on the road to vocation, where we sometimes find ourselves needing to do the right thing for the wrong reason.

the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood.

The attempt to live by the reality of our own nature, which means our limits as well as our potentials is a profoundly moral regimen. John Middleton Murray put this truth into words that challenge the conventional concept of goodness to its core: "For a good man to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a straight and narrow path compared to which his previous rectitude was flowery license.

ontology, epistemology, pedagogy, and ethics

I will not pretend that I find it easy to embrace this fact. Get me going on politicians who distort my faith tradition to win votes or on racial bigots and homophobes who want to translate their personal shadows into public policy, and this nice Quaker boy from the Midwest does a passable imitation of the Incredible Hulk.

I want my inner truth to be the plumb line for the choices I make about my life - about the work that I do and how I do it, about the relationships I enter into and how I conduct them.