Quotes about Morality

He who permits himself to tell a lie once finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, 'til at length it becomes habitual; he tells lies without attending to it and truths without the world's believing him. This falsehood of tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness

Conscience is the light by which we interpret the will of God in our own lives.

As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil.

I was entering into a moral universe in which I would be related to every other rational being, and in which whole masses of us, as thick as swarming bees, would drag one another along towards some common end of good or evil, peace or war.

our material riches unfortunately imply a spiritual, cultural, and moral poverty that are perhaps far greater than we see.

The one thing that seems to me morally certain is that this was really a grace, and a great grace.

For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God.

Once you have grace, I said to him, you are free. Without it, you cannot help doing the things you know you should not do, and that you know you don't really want to do.

Excerpt from Cracking the Safe: Thus what the world calls good business is only a way To gather up the loot, pack it, make it secure In one convenient load for the more enterprising thieves. Who is there, among those called smart, Who does not spend his time amassing loot For a bigger robber than himself?

Hence, too, the man who sins in spite of himself but does not love his sin, is not a sinner in the full sense of the word.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.