Inspirational Quotes on Morality

“Consequently, the truth of God lives in our souls more by the power of superior moral courage than by the light of an eminent intelligence. Indeed, spiritual intelligence itself depends on the fortitude and patience with which we sacrifice ourselves for the truth, as it is communicated to our lives concretely in the providential will of God”

“By gaming we lose both our time and treasure: two things most precious to the life of man.”

“The neglected heart will soon be a heart overrun with worldly thoughts; the neglected life will soon become a moral chaos.”

“Our responsibility has never been to moralize the unconverted; it's to convert the immoral. Our responsibility is redemptive, not political. We do not have a moral agenda; we have a redemptive agenda. We can't reform the kingdom of darkness that Satan rules.”

“Honesty is a moral virtue, a matter of the will. Honesty means willing the truth with the whole of your heart. This demands sacrifice. We have little hope of attaining honesty unless we realize how demanding it is. It demands sacrifice of self-will, self-image, the desire to win, and the comfort of being right. The “honesty” often praised today is usually only emotional honesty with others, not intellectual honesty with one’s self; only “letting it all hang out,” not asking what is the real truth. Sometimes “honesty” is only a code word for shamelessness. Rarely does it mean the absolute, fanatical, selfless love of truth.”

“I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.”

“You never require a teacher to lead you into the wrong path, but you do require a kindly word to conduct you aright.”

“Rakitin was dishonest and was decidedly unaware of it; that, on the contrary, knowing that he wouldn't steal money from the table, he ultimately considered himself a man of the highest integrity.”

“Yes, our country has its shortcomings, but there's no moral equivalency between democracy and totalitarianism…There's no moral equivalency between propaganda and the truth.”

“To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.”

“Nothing in the world so tends to defile the imagination, to pervert the affections, and to corrupt the morals, as self-consciousness. You know it is connected with every disease and morbid action of the body. ...All self-consciousness is of the very essence and nature of sin..”

“We have learned to live with unholiness and have come to look upon it as the natural and expected thing.”

“The greatest harm that can be suffered in the fight against perceived evil and injustice is not physical death or "occupation." It is the death of the conscience and spirit cut off from the nourishment of moral law.”

“Reverence for life affords me my fundamental principle of morality.”

“A man does not have to be an angel in order to be saint.”

“A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.”

“Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.”

“Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.”

“Humanitarianism consists in never sacrificing a human being to a purpose.”

“I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.”