Quotes About Values

A lot of our modern lifestyle is based on having things. Jesus rejected the idea that things should have a primary place in our lives. Other than the clothes on his back and the sandals on his feet, he had nothing. And his teachings constantly affirmed that people were primary and things were secondary.

I prefer the society of one faithful person to an association of rapid talkers, who more than anything else seek admiration from one another.

Money is good, but it is not all about a man. You will have successes and reversals, but remember it is your reaction to each of them that counts for your character.

She saw that he couldn't live in a way other than the one he thought was right, and when he saw what the right thing was, like now, he cared about it as if it were the only thing that mattered.

Whatever people say they believe in terms of spirituality and religion, what they do when they are sick and in need reflects the true basis of their belief system.

l'humble prend ses décisions selon ce qu'il estime être juste et s'y tient, sans s'inquiéter ni de son image ni du qu'en-dira-t-on.

Then he kissed her. Betsy didn't believe in letting boys kiss you. She thought it was silly to be letting first this boy and then that one kiss you, when it didn't mean a thing. But it was wonderful when Joe Willard kissed her. And it did mean a thing.

In the secular trinity of Irish-American values, loyalty and humor are father and son. Self-deprecation is the spirit that works in mysterious ways ...

It is not reason that gives us our moral orientation, it is sensitivity.

No morality can be established a priori. Insofar as there are only abstract ends, there is no real morality. A moral imperative only emerges in contact with a situation.

Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have the right to do and what is the right thing to do. - Potter Stewart

Electronic media is powerful and pervasive and is radically shaping modern culture with profoundly secular attitudes, values, and behavior.

I read once that you need two things to be happy: any two of health, money, and love. You can cover the absense of one with the other two... But now I realized this was unmitigated bullshit, because health and money did not compare with love at all.

That's the thing you learn about values: they're what people make up to justify what they did.

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance.

Notice I did not say what people can do--what we can do is merely a consequence of what we can be.

Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots' hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: "Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to 'destroy' and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

It seems a fair test of any political movement to enquire not whether it is capitalist, communist or fascist, but whether it is fundamentally humane.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

We cannot live by power, and a culture that seeks to live by it becomes brutal and sterile. But we can die without it.

Ressentiment is always to some degree a determinant of the romantic type of mind. At least this is so when the romantic nostalgia for some past era (Hellas, the Middle Ages, etc.) is not primarily based on the values of that period, but on the wish to escape from the present. Then all praise of the "past" has the implied purpose of downgrading present-day reality.

For bourgeois classes as such have seldom before and never since displayed heroism. It was "the last of our heroisms", as Carlyle, not without reason, has said. 

Where 'doing one's job' cannot be directly linked to the highest spiritual and cultural values--although it may be felt to be more than mere economic coercion--the individual today usually makes no attempt to find any meaning in it. Where capitalism is at its most unbridled, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, divested of its metaphysical significance, today tends to be associated with purely elemental passions, which at times virtually turn it into a sporting contest.

All theology represents an intellectual rationalization of the possession of sacred values... Every theology... presupposes that the world must have a meaning, and the question is how to interpret this meaning so that it is intellectually conceivable.