Quotes About Ends

You're searching, Joe, for things that don't exist I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings-there are no such things.

You can't plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life.

Art, as we have known it, stands on the threshold of the transcendental. It points beyond this world of accidental and disconnected things to another realm, in which human life is endowed with an emotional logic that makes suffering noble and love worthwhile. Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a 'kingdom of ends'. (p. 156)

The end may justify the means as long as there is something that justifies the end.

The great and good ends proposed by the Illuminati, as the ultimate objects of their union, are the overthrow of religion, government, and human society civil and domestic.

A vow is a heavenly created obligation in motion that only ends when fully completed.

The perfection of means and the confusion of ends seems to be our problem.

Science, however, cannot create ends and, even less, instill them in human beings; science, at most, can supply the means by which to attain certain ends. But the ends themselves are conceived by personalities with lofty ethical ideals and—if these ends are not stillborn, but vital and vigorous—are adopted and carried forward by those many human beings who, half unconsciously, determine the slow evolution of society.

But the nature of the universe is such that the ends never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end.

The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

Good ends, as I have frequently to point out, can be achieved only by the employment of appropriate means. The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends; and must be like the ends proposed. Means intrinsically different from the ends proposed achieve ends like themselves, not like those they were meant to achieve.

And yet our personal experience and the study of history make it abundantly clear that the means whereby we try to achieve something are at least as important as the end we wish to attain. Indeed they are even more important. For the means employed inevitably determine the nature of the result achieved; whereas, however good the end aimed at may be, its goodness is powerless to counteract the effects of the bad means we use to reach it.

To give organisations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.

It is not good in itself; it is good only to the extent that it promotes the good of the individuals who are the parts of the collective whole. To give organizations precedence over persons is to subordinate ends to means.

ethics is at the center of both spiritual practice and social transformation. Without a strong ethical foundation, we inevitably fall into contradictions-between means and ends, between our actions and our ideals." (p. 9)

Sixth, the Spiritual Disciplines are means, not ends. The end—that is, the purpose of practicing the Disciplines—is godliness.

So while we cannot be godly without the practice of the Disciplines, we can practice the Disciplines without being godly if we see them as ends and not means.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.

There have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means aren't really important," [King] said. "But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize the ends are not cut off from the means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in the process, and ultimately you can't reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.

My father told me to follow your teachings. But you argue that the ends justify the means. Doesn't each generation need to learn anew that fighting evil with evil serves only to make one evil himself?

In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

Sadism is all right in its place, but it should be directed to proper ends.

Man is born a tabula rasa; he must learn how to choose the ends that are proper for him and the means that he must adopt to attain them. All this must be done by his reason.