Moral Life Quotes - Page 2

• My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

  Grace Paley

  Writing, Vocabulary, Useless

  Grace Paley (2014). “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories”, p.85, Macmillan

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• A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves out to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming age of barbarism and darkness.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Men, Community, Darkness

  "After Virtue". Book by Alasdair MacIntyre, 1981.

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• The Buddha takes no position on gods, he suggests they may exist or they may not, but either way you can live a moral life.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  May, Way, Moral

  Source: www.theguardian.com

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• We should seek to free the moral life from the embarrassments and entanglements in which it has been involved by the quibbles of the schools and the mutual antagonisms of the sects; to introduce into it an element of downrightness and practical earnestness; above all, to secure to the modern world, in its struggle with manifold evil, the boon of moral unity, despite intellectual diversity.

  Felix Adler

  Struggle, School, Diversity

  "Life and Destiny". Book by Felix Adler, 1903.

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• Man is like a tree, with the mighty trunk of intellect, the spreading branches of imagination, and the roots of the lower instincts that bind him to the earth. The moral life, however, is the fruit he bears; in it his true nature is revealed.

  Felix Adler

  Men, Roots, Imagination

  "Life and Destiny". Book by Felix Adler, 1903.

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

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  Race, Moral Development, Law

  Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (2009). “The Path of the Law”, p.6, The Floating Press

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• We may not need God to tell us where the world came from, but we need God to be able to live moral lives and for there to be morality in the first place.

  Rebecca Goldstein

  World, May, Able

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The poet has to make a synthesis out of the moral life of our time, and this life is lived at this moment on a political plane.

  Rose Macaulay

  Political, Synthesis, Moral

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• The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

  George Eliot

  Animal, Ideas, Self

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6068, Delphi Classics

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• We hold from God the gift which includes all others. This gift is life - physical, intellectual, and moral life.

  Frederic Bastiat

  Wisdom, Intellectual, Politics

  Frederic Bastiat (2006). “The Law”, p.3, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

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• No light privilege is it to have a hand in building up the moral life of these new communities; no common honour surely to help to lay side by side with the foundations of their free political institutions the broad and deep foundations of the Church of God.

  Henry Parry Liddon

  Light, Hands, Building Up

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• We can act as if there were a God; feel as if we were free; consider Nature as if she were full of special designs; lay plans as if we were to be immortal; and we find then that these words do make a genuine difference in our moral life.

  William James

  Differences, Design, Special

  The Varieties of Religious Experience Lecture 3 (1902)

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• As a child I was taught that to tell the truth was often painful. As an adult I have learned that not to tell the truth is more painful, and that the fear of telling the truth - whatever the truth may be - that fear is the most painful sensation of a moral life.

  June Jordan

  Children, May, Taught

  June Jordan (2009). “Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays”, p.133, Basic Books

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• The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.

  George Eliot

  Men, Animal, Self

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6068, Delphi Classics

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• The religiously observant is lumped in with the nominal Muslim, the nominal Muslim is lumped in with the non-Muslim and the radical. If we want to make sense of this mess and stop pushing Muslims into the arms of the extremist, we need to make meaningful distinctions between the religion of Islam that a billion Muslims follow and see as a guidance as a peaceful righteous moral life and the puritanical Islam of a minority which so captures the media's attention.

  Reza Aslan

  Meaningful, Media, Religion Of Islam

  Source: www.sbs.com.au

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• A long-established occupation may form the very foundations of the moral life, that the art with which a man has solaced his toil may be the salvation of his uncertain temperament.

  Jane Addams

  Art, Men, Long

  Jane Addams (1949). “Twenty Years at Hull-House: With Autobiographical Notes”, p.132, Hayes Barton Press

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• If I've learned anything in twenty-nine years, it's that every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. My gift - bad choice of words - is that I can look at you, him, her, them, whoever, and tell right away what is keeping them awake at night: money; feelings of insignificance; overwhelming boredom; evil children; job troubles; or perhaps death, in one of its many costumes, perched in the wings. What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

  Douglas Coupland

  Jobs, Children, Night

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• What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

  Douglas Coupland

  Humanity, Plight, Moral

  "Hey Nostradamus!". Book by Douglas Coupland, 2003.

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• My language limitations here are real. My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life. If I really knew this language, there would surely be in my head, as there is in Webster's or the Dictionary of American Slang, that unreducible verb designed to tell a person like me what to do next.

  Grace Paley

  Real, Writing, Vocabulary

  Grace Paley (2014). “Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories”, p.85, Macmillan

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• If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself.

  Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

  Courage, Learning, Knowledge

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• It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it's perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

  J. K. Rowling

  Wise, Witty, Believe

  Person of the Year Runner-up 2007, content.time.com. December 19, 2007.

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• Not only our moral life, but even our use of theoretical reason - on which we rely in rationally inquiring into nature - presupposes that we are free.

  Allen W. Wood

  Use, Inquiring, Moral

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I was a wife and mother, blameless in moral life, with a deep sense of duty and a proud self-respect; it was while I was this that doubt struck me, and while I was in the guarded circle of the home, with no dream of outside work or outside liberty, that I lost all faith in Christianity.

  Annie Besant

  Mother, Dream, Home

  Annie Besant (1893). “Annie Besant: An Autobiography”

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• It is a fool only, and not the philosopher, nor even the prudent man, that will live as if there were no God... Were a man impressed as fully and strongly as he ought to be with the belief of a God, his moral life would be regulated by the force of belief; he would stand in awe of God and of himself, and would not do the thing that could not be concealed from either.

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Religion, Would Be

  Thomas Paine (2015). “The Thomas Paine Collection: Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, An Essay on Dream, Biblical Blasphemy, Examination Of The Prophecies”, p.288, Ravenio Books

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• It is horrible! It is not the suffering and the death of the animals that is horrible, but the fact that the man without any need for so doing crushes his lofty feeling of sympathy and mercy for living creatures and does violence to himself that he may be cruel. The first element of moral life is abstinence.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Crush, Men, Animal

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