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"Morality is a check upon the strongest temptations."
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Exlpore more Character quotes
"One of the characteristics of humility is the ability to take the second place without striving for self-promotion."
"The more success a person has in life, the greater the danger of fornication can become."
"If you know how it's to be treated unfairly, you will be gentle with others."
"Don't marry the most beautiful woman in the world, marry the woman with the most beautiful deeds."
"Character is what the world needs - character that will empower the mind with such an unimaginable strength that one would meet death face to face and say "some other time, pal!"
"Failures make character, not success."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?"
"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet."
"So she prayed, Lord, give me patience. She knew that was not an honest prayer, and she did not linger over it....it cost her tears to think that her situation might actually be that desolate, so she prayed again for patience, for tact, for understanding--for every virtue that might keep her safe from conflicts that would be sure to leave her wounded, every virtue that might at least help her to preserve an appearance of dignity, for heaven's sake."
"There is a saying that to understand is to forgive, but that is an error, so Papa used to say. You must forgive in order to understand. Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding...If you forgive, he would say, you may indeed still not understand, but you will be ready to understand, and that is a posture of grace."
"Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view."
"For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it? And here again is a foreshadowing-the world will be made whole. For to wish for a hand on one's hair is all but to feel it. So whatever we may lose, very craving gives it back to us again. Though we dream and hardly know it, longing, like an angel, fosters us, smooths our hair, and brings us wild strawberries."
"Adulthood is a wonderful thing and brief. You must be sure to enjoy it while it lasts. I believe the soul in Paradise must enjoy something nearer to a perpetual vigorous adulthood than to any other state we know."
"Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing."
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