Quotes About Values

Being an effective person-centred counsellor is not so much a matter of possessing skills and knowledge, but of having a particular set of deeply-held values and beliefs and then being able to express these qualities in interactions with other people.

I picked up a secondhand copy—$7.99—and read the text on the back: "Either, then, one is to live aesthetically or one is to live ethically." My heart was pounding. There was a book about this?

isn't religious but she does have an immutable sense of right and wrong and

Achieving is the most important thing to you. It's more important than love, Bess said when she was fifteen years old. And wow—Ursula had felt that comment like a slap to the face. Bess has mellowed as she's gotten

What a person does isn't the same as who a person is.

American husbands are the best in the world; no other husbands are so generous to their wives, or can be so easily divorced.

Giving a damn and doing what is right are rewards in themselves.

I didn't fully realize it at the time, but the goal of my life was profoundly molded by this experience - to help produce, in the next generation, more Mother Teresas and less Hitlers.

She was a woman who cared more about what she was right about than about being right.

I go to taste simplicity. Not the simplicity of a golden age; but the simplicity of gold and tinsel.

Mark I. Rosen writes, "We admire traits in others that we admire in ourselves; we denigrate others when their behavior doesn't conform to our values. We find it almost impossible to climb inside someone else's head and see the world through different eyes.

It was a morally complex equation.

Everybody seemed to think I would sell out anything, in order to gain a little physical comfort.

Society was self-interest given a pretty gloss.

He said he judged people by their characters. I said was that always a quite good way of judging, as people's characters get so different at times, as it depends so much what happens to them.

Was honour the same as conscience? If not, how did one choose between them? And was the choice, when made, bitter as gall?

People are very inclined to set moral standards for others.

We were never a family that had a lot. We had enough, but not a lot.

Your choices and decisions are a reflection of how well you've set and followed your priorities.

Here's the thing: the unit of reverence in Europe is the family, which is why a child born today of unmarried parents in Sweden has a better chance of growing up in a house with both of his parents than a child born to a married couple in America. Here we revere the couple, there they revere the family.

There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.

Right and wrong, I learned that day, could not really be taught after all, only felt.

Eating Animals" closes with a turkey-less Thanksgiving. As a holiday, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun. But this is Foer's point. We are, he suggests, defined not just by what we do; we are defined by what we are willing to do without. Vegetarianism requires the renunciation of real and irreplaceable pleasures. To Foer's credit, he is not embarrassed to ask this of us.

In the end, I always act from the heart, even if I also value reason and tradition. I wish I could explain why, but I don't know.