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Morality Quotes
"Integrity comes not from privilege, textbooks, or profession, but from being grounded in humility."
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"It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know."
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"As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don't think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, 'I'm probably no better than you, but I'm certainly your equal."
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"Now that lilacs are in bloomShe has a bowl of lilacs in her roomAnd twists one in her fingers while she talks."Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not knowWhat life is, you who hold it in your hands"; (slowly twisting the lilac stalks)"You let it flow from you, you let it flow,And youth is cruel, and has no remorseAnd smiles at situations which it cannot see."I smile, of course,And go on drinking tea."
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"Peace, though beloved of our Lord, is a cardinal virtue only if your neighbors share your conscience."
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"Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor both to yourself and to your country let men label you as they may."
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"You've got to love what's lovable and hate what's hateable. It takes brains to see the difference."
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"Good words alone does not make a person good, but good deeds makes a person great."
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"Mr. Montag, you are looking at a coward. I saw the way things were going a long time back. I said nothing. I am one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the 'guilty,' but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself."
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"A bad conscience is easier to cope with than a bad reputation."
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"All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil."
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"Satirize wickedness if you must--but pity weakness."
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"Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad."
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"I mind how I said to you once that there is a price for being good the same as for being bad; a cost to pay. And it's the good men that cant deny the bill when it comes around. They cant deny it for the reason that there aint any way to make them pay it, like a honest man that gambles. The bad men can deny it; that's why dont anybody expect them to pay on sight or any other time. But the good cant. Maybe it takes longer to pay for being good than for being bad."
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"The worst evil is that most subtle evil. It is the evil that is merely 'base' which is more evil than evil itself. For it is the one closest to righteousness, the one indistinguishable and doused in virtue."
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"We don't need any sort of religious orientation to lead a life that is ethical, compassionate & kind."
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"If it be well weighed, to say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God and a coward towards men."
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"Sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don't, someone else will."
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"Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment."
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"The selfish man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom that selfishness withholds some important benefit."
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"Were the walls of our meat industry to become transparent, literally or even figuratively, we would not long continue to raise, kill, and eat animals the way we do."
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"Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function."
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"Never attempt to take your own or somebody else's life because someday you will account for that."
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"Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?"
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"It doesn't make you a monster to want, she said, her voice very gentle. It's what you do with it that matters."
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"Human beings are free except when humanity needs them. Maybe humanity needs you. To do something. Maybe humanity needs me-to find out what you're good for. We might both do despicable things, Ender, but if humankind survives, then we were good tools."
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"If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed."
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"Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of any one. For no one can judge a criminal, until he recognises that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime."
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"You can't help it but you were born without a heart. At least you tried to believe what the people with hearts believed - so you were a good man just the same."
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"Valor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth; and his alert acceptance of it, from whatever quarter; the intrepid conviction that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world may at any time be superseded and decease."
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"I fear that in the individual lives of all but a few, the balance is in debit - we do so little that is positive good, even if we negatively avoid what is actively evil."
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"What maintains one vice would bring up two children."
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