Morals Quotes - Page 5

You know…it always seems obvious to outsiders when someone is doing something wrong, but when your mind is in the midst of evil, it is easy to be manipulated by crueller instincts.

Direct lies, small lies, huge lies, and lies of omission… these are all self-serving and sources of self-destruction.

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners."Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.

The reason America is in its death-throes is because America has lost moral authority.

You know the world has gone mad when those who have enlightened, compassionate views and future visions, are accused of borderline insanity, ridiculed and criticised for thinking positively.

A moral system valid for all is basically immoral.

When wisdom gives way to whimsy and ethics fall to excitement, it is highly likely that the ground beneath me will ‘give way’ and it is I who will ‘fall.

If one should desire to know whether a kingdom is well governed, if its morals are good or bad, the quality of its music will furnish the answer.

Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits. Oh, come now, we are no strangers to the vicious demons in placid disguises, innocent eyes so wide, hidden minds so dark. Does evil exist? Is it a force, some deadly possession that slips into the unwary? Is it a thing separate and thus subject to accusation and blame, distinct from the one it has used? Does it flit from soul to soul, weaving its diabolical scheme in all the unseen places, snarling into knots tremulous fears and appalling opportunity, stark terrors and brutal self-interest? Or is the dread word nothing more than a quaint and oh so convenient encapsulation of all those traits distinctly lacking moral context, a sweeping generalization embracing all things depraved and breath takingly cruel, a word to define that peculiar glint in the eye—the voyeur to one’s own delivery of horror, of pain and anguish and impossible grief?Give the demon crimson scales, slashing talons. Tentacles and dripping poison. Three eyes and six slithering tongues. As it crouches there in the soul, its latest abode in an eternal succession of abodes, may every god kneel in prayer.But really. Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectification is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity—the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.But if that is too dire, let’s call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.There are extremities of behaviour that seem, at the time, perfectly natural, indeed reasonable. They are arrived at suddenly, or so it might seem, but if one looks the progression reveals itself, step by step, and that is a most sad truth.

The world has enough deceit, decay, and despair; be different.

Life is short. Life is uncertain. But we know that we have today. And we have each other. I believe that for each of us, there is a place on the frontlines.

The moral of the tale is this: whoever allows himself to be whipped,deserves to be whipped.

The innocence of children is what makes them stand out as a shining example to the rest of Mankind.

There is no justice in the laws of nature, no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The Universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! WE care! There IS light in the world, and it is US!

You made a lifetime commitment before God and the world. A silly thing like a divorce doesn’t reverse it.

I follow suit, said the lion, vacating his coat of arms and movie logos; and the eagle said, Get me off this flag.

When you devalue ethics and morals by proclaiming that our attitude toward them should be casual or lenient, you can't be surprised by a rising generation who then behaves disrespectfully, treating life, people, and choices as if they possess little value or worth.  For whether or not that was the intention, society has taught them to believe thusly.

There is a morality of reason, a morality proper to man, and Man’s Life is its standard of value.All that which is proper to the life of a rational being is the good; all that which destroys it is the evil.

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity’s soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes.

We have glamorized vice and minimized virtue. We have played down gentleness, manners, and morals—while we have played up rudeness, savagery, and vice . . . and the philosophy of “might is right.

All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.

Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.

The first and second commandments are the only therapy the world has ever needed. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind . . . Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” [Matthew 22:37, 39 KJV].

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.

To think is an act of choice. The key to what you so recklessly call ‘human nature,’ the open secret you live with, yet dread to name, is the fact that man is a being of volitional consciousness. Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct.

Errors do not cease to be errors simply because they’re ratified into law.

...there’s a great deal which I don’t understandin people. In a human being everything should be beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, the thoughts. . . .Often I see a beautiful face and clothes, so beautiful that my head gets giddy with rapture; but as for the soul and thoughts,my God! In a beautiful outside there’s sometimes hidden such a black soul that no whitening can rub it off...

Pakistan not only means freedom and independence but the Muslim Ideology which has to be preserved, which has come to us as a precious gift and treasure and which, we hope other will share with us.

Is it possible that future generations will regard our present agribuisness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Mengele's experiments? My own initial reaction is that such a comparison is hysterical, extreme - and yet the reason it seems extreme to me appears to be that I believe animals are less morally important than human behings; and when it comes to defending such a belief, even to myself, I have to acknowledge that (a) I have an obvious selfish interest in this belief, since I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and (b) I haven't succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.

Our art is never really ours. Each person who experiences it brings to it a piece of themselves and reacts to it in ways that stem from their personal struggles, beliefs, morals, and even hang-ups.

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

Is lawlessness to be permitted, simply because it is effected with a certain style? Jane, Jane! Where are your finer sensibilities? All o'erthrown, by a man with a golden tongue and a mocking glance?

No president likes leaks, but it’s worth noting candidate Trump’s path to power was tread on a road of leaks. He didn’t have a problem with leaks then. It’s not a moral position if you only hold it when it applies to you.

To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.""How terrible," said Farukhuaz."Do you think so? I find it reassuring. It saves me from having to divine meaning in every sorrow that comes my way.

Immorality sanctified by tradition is still immorality.

If we dare examine our decisions, we will see our values woven in and through every single one of them. Therefore, it would do us well to take an occasional peek to insure that our values remain at their peak.

Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.

Dear child, some stories have no morals. Sometimes darkness and madness are simply that.

One Crack On A Mirror Can Ruin The Beauty of It But Most Importantly, It Ruins The Reflection of The Individual, By Making It Twisted, Zigzag And Ugly. Character Is Like A Mirror. So Build Your Character In Such A Way That It Reflects All The Good In Others Who Follows You Or Treat You As An Idol....

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

It's all a matter of perception. What one person deems to be important may be just as equally unimportant to another.What one deems to be right may seem very wrong to someone else.Your moral compass and values may not always be totally in sync with others you meet. In the end it's all just your perception of how you choose to live your life and this may not always win you friends. In fact it may gain you some enemies.Live your life how you choose to and if people don't like the way you do things then disagree if you must, but be nice & be respectful and then if you must, move on and leave it all behind you. It's your life after all and only you can live it. Choose your path and set your compass then start walking.

Tomorrow's world can not exist without morals, without faith and memory. Cynicism, narrow interests and cowardice must not occupy our lives.

We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.

Sometimes we punish our selves the most.

You believe stealing is wrong, but if your family was starving and could not afford bread, wouldn't you say it’s okay to steal a loaf to feed them?

Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it—that no substitute can do your thinking—that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

The best defense is to change and adapt without losing values and morals.

The poison that is war does not free us from the ethics of responsibility. There are times when we must take this poison - just as a person with cancer accepts chemotherapy to live. We can not succumb to despair. Force is and I suspect always will be part of the human condition. There are times when the force wielded by one immoral faction must be countered by a faction that, while never moral, is perhaps less immoral. We in the industrialized world bear responsibility for the world’s genocides because we had the power to intervene and did not. We stood by and watched the slaughter in Chechnya, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Rwanda where a million people died. The blood for the victims of Srebrenica- a designated UN safe area in Bosnia- is on our hands. The generation before mine watched, with much the same passivity, the genocides of Germany, Poland, Hungary, Greece, and the Ukraine. These slaughters were, as in, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book Chronical of a Death Foretold, often announced in advance

Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man’s only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.

Dear Child, Sometimes on your travel through hell, you meet people that think they are in heaven because of their cleverness and ability to get away with things. Travel past them because they don't understand who they have become and never will. These type of people feel justified in revenge and will never learn mercy or forgiveness because they live by comparison. They are the people that don't care about anyone, other than who is making them feel confident. They don’t understand that their deity is not rejoicing with them because of their actions, rather he is trying to free them from their insecurities, by softening their heart. They rather put out your light than find their own. They don't have the ability to see beyond the false sense of happiness they get from destroying others. You know what happiness is and it isn’t this. Don’t see their success as their deliverance. It is a mask of vindication which has no audience, other than their own kind. They have joined countless others that call themselves “survivors”. They believe that they are entitled to win because life didn’t go as planned for them. You are not like them. You were not meant to stay in hell and follow their belief system. You were bound for greatness. You were born to help them by leading. Rise up and be the light home. You were given the gift to see the truth. They will have an army of people that are like them and you are going to feel alone. However, your family in heaven stands beside you now. They are your strength and as countless as the stars. It is time to let go!Love, Your Guardian Angel

The anti-mind is the anti-life.

There was no right or wrong during war. The setting sun made me realize that the ones who would live to see a new day would be the ones who are victorious. As with all the history of this world, the ones who won were always right.

What Is A Belief?

We continue to need exhortations to be sympathetic and just, even if we do not believe that there is a God who has a hand in wishing to make us so. We no longer have to be brought into line by the threat of hell or the promise of paradise; we merely have to be reminded that it is we ourselves -- that is, the most mature and reasonable parts of us (seldom present in the midst of our crises and obsessions) -- who want to lead the sort of life which we once imagined supernatural beings demanded of us. An adequate evolution of morality from superstition to reason should mean recognizing ourselves as the authors of our own moral commandments.

Do not be deceived: bad company corrupts good morals.