Top 1200 Moral Virtues Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

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.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

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.

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.

There was about all the Romans a heroic tone peculiar to ancient life. Their virtues were great and noble, and these virtues madethem great and noble. They possessed a natural majesty that was not put on and taken off at pleasure, as was that of certain eastern monarchs when they put on or took off their garments of Tyrian dye. It is hoped that this is not wholly lost from the world, although the sense of earthly vanity inculcated by Christianity may have swallowed it up in humility.

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.

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.

Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.

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

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.

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.

Religion shows a pattern of heredity which I think is similar to genetic heredity. ... There are hundreds of different religious sects, and every religious person is loyal to just one of these. ... The overwhelming majority just happen to choose the one their parents belonged to. Not the sect that has the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedral, the best stained-glass, the best music when it comes to choosing from the smorgasbord of available religions, their potential virtues seem to count for nothing compared to the matter of heredity.

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?

That is the gay agenda...it is the recreation of society on a different moral foundation and the problem with that is that moral foundation will lead to social chaos and destruction.

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

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.

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

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 genius of American culture and its integrity comes from fidelity to the light. Plain as day, we say. Happy as the day is long. Early to bed, early to rise. American virtues are daylight virtues: honesty, integrity, plain speech. We say yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no, and all else comes from the evil one. America presumes innocence and even the right to happiness.

By the worldly standards of public life, all scholars in their work are of course oddly virtuous. They do not make wild claims, they do not cheat, they do not try to persuade at any cost, they appeal neither to prejudice nor to authority, they are often frank about their ignorance, their disputes are fairly decorous, they do not confuse what is being argued with race, politics, sex or age, they listen patiently to the young and to the old who both know everything. These are the general virtues of scholarship, and they are peculiarly the virtues of science.

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.

Every government, left or right, always engages in moral crusades. What else are they supposed to do? Especially when they make war; any war has to be a moral crusade.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I believe that rules do not make us moral; loving each other makes us moral.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

These theories, deontology, the moral rights theory, and utilitarianism, contradict one another. Moreover, they give conflicting (inconsistent) recommendations. It is hence not possible to hold them together, in a pursuit of moral truth.

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.

Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.

The greatest moral failing is to condemn something as a moral failing: no vice is worse than being judgmental.

Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other.

Science can and should inform debate about abortion and the law. But science does not resolve questions of moral value and moral choice.

The Church is not a political power, nor a political party, but rather a moral reality, a moral force.

A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.

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.

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.

The test of moral ideas is moral results.

[The World Trade Center and the Pentagon] have drawn, like gathered lightning, the anger of the enemies of civilization. Those enemies are always out there.... Americans are slow to anger but mighty when angry, and their proper anger now should be alloyed with pride. They are targets because of their virtues-principally democracy, and loyalty to those nations which, like Israel, are embattled salients of our virtues in a still-dangerous world.

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

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

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.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

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.

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.

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

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

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.

... we can see both that love for God is begotten from the virtues and that virtues are born of love. For this reason the Lord said at one point in the Gospels, 'He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me' (Jn. 14:21), and at another point, 'He who loves Me will keep My commandments' (cf. Jn. 14:23).

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.

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.