Top 1200 Moral Lessons Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

One's own independent judgment is the means by which one must choose one's actions, but it is not a moral criterion nor a moral validation; only reference to a demonstrable principle can validate one's choices.

Unless you're a true prodigy, you're going to have to practice for a while being bad before you get any good. And it will seem like a waste of time. I remember that feeling well. But don't worry about wasting time, because it'll be so worth it. It's my experience that in the end, life lessons and guitar lessons begin to blur in all sorts of interesting ways.

I don't have a constituency, and I'm not autobiographical in any way. I write these deeply moral books in a country which would prefer irony to anything with a moral tone.

There is nothing - not any religious or secular body of work - that comes close to the Bible in forming the moral bases of Western civilization and therefore of nearly all moral progress in the world.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

Some of the best lessons that I've ever learned are on a ball field - basketball, football, baseball, golf. And I learned great lessons from my coaches - being on time, being mentally tough, having some discipline, and being part of a team.

You cannot have Liberty in this world without what you call Moral Virtue, and you cannot have Moral Virtue without the slavery of that half of the human race who hate what you call Moral Virtue.

I wanted to start doing more music, doing more things than just playing guitar. I started taking singing lessons and piano lessons. I need to learn more things, to be an artist or whatever, and then transfer that back into writing songs.

There is a claim coming from the West that says that all art must be outside any moral consideration. I can understand this as a provocation, but I also believe that we can still have very profound creativity with a moral sense.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

In the final forms of moral disengagement, wrongdoers treat adversaries as subhuman animalistic, demonic beings. Expunging any sense of shared humanity eliminates moral restraints.

Learning lessons is a little like reaching maturity. You're not suddenly more happy, wealthy, or powerful, but you understand the world around you better, and you're at peace with yourself. Learning life's lessons is not about making your life perfect, but about seeing life as it was meant to be.

I believe in both a creative and personal God, a divinely ordered universe, that man has an innate moral sense, and that Jesus was a great moral teacher, perhaps the greatest the world has witnessed.

... any woman who accepts aloneness as the natural by-product of success is accepting a punishment for a crime she didn't commit. And she is not acknowledging one of the most precious lessons of the women's movement, the lessons of community ... We may not able to tell women that there is safety in freedom. But we certainly can say, with absolute certainty, that for free women, the only safety is in numbers.

Although a person acting under authority performs actions that seem to violate standards of conscience, it would not be true to say that he loses his moral sense. Instead, it acquires a radically different focus. He does not respond with a moral sentiment to the actions he performs. Rather, his moral concern now shifts to a consideration of how well he is living up to the expectations that the authority has of him.

Much of the world's moral compass is broken. The moral north reads south and the moral south reads north.

History has taught us that freedom cannot long survive unless it is based on moral foundations. You can get the economics right, but in addition liberty must be cultivated as a moral quality.

Few things are more damaging to our democracy than a military officer who doesn't have the moral courage to stand up for what's right or the moral fiber to step aside when circumstances dictate.

The downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Let's just call things what they are. When a man's love of finery clouds his moral judgment, that is vanity. When he lets a demanding palate make his moral choices, that is gluttony. When he ascribes the divine will to his own whims, that is pride. And when he gets angry at being reminded of animal suffering that his own daily choices might help avoid, that is moral cowardice.

We need to be clear when we venerate entrepreneurs what we are venerating.They are not moral leaders. If they were moral leaders, they wouldn't be great businessmen.

I think the way things have been left after Iraq is that people won't believe the Government of the day, so they have to know that lessons have been learnt and that all political parties and people, whether they were for or against the invasion of Iraq, have learnt lessons.

I remember my mom threatening me, half-serious: 'You know what? I should take you to Pittsburgh and put you in dance lessons just to keep you occupied.' Well, that brought everything to a screeching halt. 'Jeeze, dance lessons.' In retrospect, it would have been awesome, but then, 'Ugh, dancing - dancing's for sissies.'

I just started as a part of the public school music program. I took lessons at the school every Friday and was a part of the school band. I was just a normal kid taking instrumental lessons at school, nothing special.

To be sure, a good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand of the artists moral intentions, means ruiningtheir craft.

Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.

Maybe there's a little girl who thinks she can be an Olympic athlete, and she sees all the things I struggled through to get here. Yeah, I didn't walk away with a medal or run away with a medal, but I think there's lessons to be learned when you win and lessons to be learned when you lose.

I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.

Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9% of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego.

Time after time mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time mankind must learn the hard lessons of history-the lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can't seem to keep in our collective memory.

God has so framed us as to make freedom of choice and action the very basis of all moral improvement, and all our faculties, mental and moral, resent and revolt against the idea of coercion.

Words of divine consciousness: moral exaltation; lasting feelings of elevation, elation, joy; a quickening of the moral sense, which strikes one as more important than an intellectual understanding of things; an alignment of the universe along moral lines, not intellectual ones; a realization that the founding principle of existence is what we call love, which works itself out sometimes not clearly, not cleanly, not immediately, nonetheless ineluctably.

Prophet just means intellectual. They were people giving geopolitical analysis, moral lessons, that sort of thing. We call them intellectuals today. There were the people we honor as prophets, there were the people we condemn as false prophets. But if you look at the biblical record, at the time, it was the other way around. The flatterers of the Court of King Ahab were the ones who were honored. The ones we call prophets were driven into the desert and imprisoned.

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Should our moral beliefs really prove to be dependent on factual assumptions shown to be incorrect, it would be hardly moral to defend them by refusing to acknowledge the facts.

...if God teaches us victory in Christ Jesus day by day, we live in the constant awareness of His greatness and His sufficiency. Hard lessons are often long-lasting lessons. Never forget that God is far more interested in our getting to know the Deliverer than simply being delivered.

And last of all we have the secondary forms of crystals bursting in upon us, and sparkling in the rigidity of mathematical necessity and telling us, neither of harmony of design, usefulness or moral significance, nothing but spherical trigonometry and Napier's analogies. It is because we have blindly excluded the lessons of these angular bodies from the domain of human knowledge that we are still in doubt about the great doctrine that the only laws of matter are those which our minds must fabricate, and the only laws of mind are fabricated for it by matter.

There are many lessons people can learn about the left. One of the key lessons is they never give anything up. Once they begin a quest, they don't stop until they've got it. The other thing that you need to learn is, they're never happy even after they succeed. They are never happy because there can never be enough to satisfy them.

Morals - all correct moral laws - derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

I think empathy can serve as a moral spark, motivating us to do good things. But anything can be a moral spark.

Moral relativism says morality is relative, not absolute, I want to show moral relativism, in its popular form, is logically incoherent.

I'm a former CIA officer and Pentagon official. I'm a deep believer in border security, but we have to be a nation of moral - of morals and, like, a moral core.

I like the idea of young readers using my stories as a sort of moral gym, where they can flex and develop their newly developed moral muscle.

My parents wanted us to be pool-safe, so I had lessons when I was 18 months old. I would like to share with all the parents out there that I was that kid who cried during every one of my lessons. But it wasn't an option for my parents; we had a backyard pool, so I needed to learn how to swim.

It is fairly easy to grasp abstract moral principles; it can be very difficult to apply them to a given situation, particularly when it involves the moral character of another person.

Marxism is a success because it fuses the two inconsistent strains in Western thought - moral skepticism and moral indignation - and makes them complements in the attack against existing society.

Literature ceases to be literature when it commits itself to moral uplift; it becomes moral philosophy or some such dull thing.

The test of moral ideas is moral results.

How can an act done under compulsion have any moral element in it, seeing that what is moral is the free act of an intelligent being?

When I was 5, I started taking singing lessons, and then, after 'School of Rock,' I started taking guitar lessons. I would always write songs and play them for my friends, and I would play my guitar on the set a lot.

I took lessons for about everything you could imagine - gymnastics to karate to flute and piano. My mom always definitely kept me in some kind of class or program, but for guitar, I kinda gave up on then kinda just taught myself. Same thing with piano. I've never been good with following lessons.

In later years, when I started working in police ethics, I was professionally drawn back to the topic but as well was better able to see two sides to loyalty - its importance for certain central human relations such as friendships, but also its corruptibility in the sense that loyalty could be invoked against other moral constraints: it sometimes function as something of a moral Trojan horse, undermining other moral considerations.

There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

The moral duty of man consists of imitatingthe moral goodness and beneficence of God,manifested in the creation, toward all His creatures.

I think it is very important to build the moral fibre of the youth. Moral education should be part of the curriculum, and I will work towards introducing that.

"Teachers"... treat students neither coercively nor instrumentally but as joint seekers of truth and of mutual actualization. They help students define moral values not by imposing their own moralities on them but by positing situations that pose hard moral choices and then encouraging conflict and debate. They seek to help students rise to higher stages of moral reasoning and hence to higher levels of principled judgment.

When I was about 9, my brother, who's six years older than me, started getting guitar lessons, and I wouldn't say that it inspired me to pick up an instrument: it was more me being like, 'Well, if he's getting guitar lessons, then so am I. I'm not missing out,' type of thing.

After three months of singing, Hef heard me practicing once. He tried to convince me to quit singing lessons because there was no chance of being good at it. Of course, I cried a lot when he said that, but it was my money that I was investing in lessons so I continued partly out of spite and partly because I really wanted to do it.