ethical maturity Quotes

The arts are not simply skills: their concern is the intellectual, ethical, and spiritual maturity of human life. And in a time when religious and political institutions are so busy engraving images of marketable gods and candidates that they lose their vision of human dignity, the arts have become the custodians of those values which most worthily difine humanity, which most sensitively define Divinity.

Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.

All are agreed that the various moral qualities are in a sense bestowed by nature: we are just, and capable of temperance, and brave, and possessed of the other virtues from the moment of our birth. But nevertheless we expect to find that true goodness is something different, and that the virtues in the true sense come to belong to us in another way. For even children and wild animals possess the natural dispositions, yet without Intelligence these may manifestly be harmful.

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

When wisdom reaches the acme of perfection, it will suppress the vicious instincts and injurious desires.

It seemed to me that every adult did something terrible sooner or later. And every child, I thought, sooner or later becomes an adult.

How in the end can one possibly hold anyone responsible for our own underdeveloped visions, or undeveloped strength of character?

Assuming, as you grow older, that you're the guardian of the world's wisdom, even if you haven't necessarily lived enough to know what's right and wrong.

And yet humanity is so not evolved that how can you expect anything absolutely major to happen? Look how long, we move ahead in technology, how much do we move ahead in morality or emotion? We move ahead so minimally, minimally, minimally.

God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more that the restraint of ten vicious.

We live in a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about dying than we know about living.

Even a good man sees evil days, as long as his good deed has not ripened; but when his good deed has ripened, then does the good man see happy days.

Young people, take heart: the older you get, the fewer commandments you will have the strength to break.

With age, I have become both more pious and more shameless.

The world has achieved brilliance without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

When a man is old enough to do wrong he should be old enough to do right also.

Much of our adult morality, in books and out of them, has a stuffiness unworthy of childhood. Our grown-up conclusions often rest on perilously soft bottom.

Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed or governed their passions, but because they have cultivate their understandings.

For the first time in human history, there seems to be a radical increase in the proportion reaching principled morality.

Our humanity is trapped by moral adolescents. We have too many men of science, too few men of God. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom and power without conscience.

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. The way to win an atomic war is to make certain it never starts. And the way to make sure it never starts is to abolish the dangerous costly nuclear stockpiles which imprison mankind.

About the time we get old enough to be as wicked as we want to be, we don't want to be so very wicked after all.

None of us is born a justice. We grow into becoming one.