Moral Authenticity Quotes

Most thoughtful people would agree that morality in the absence of policing is somehow more truly moral than the kind of false morality that vanishes as soon as the police go on strike or the spy camera is switched off, whether the spy camera is a real one monitored in the police station or an imaginary one in heaven.

It is easier to be virtuous than it is to appear so, and it pays better.

The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind.

Your only obligation in any lifetime is to be true to yourself. Being true to anyone else or anything else is not only impossible, but the mark of a fake messiah.

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate; they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.

We often pray to be better, when in truth we only want to feel better.

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking?

No society, no individual, can be at peace with himself if his past is repressed or dishonest.

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked. The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.

Am I honest? Am I sincere? Do I really desire first the praise of God?

I can only live in the world of truth, inasmuch as I'm able to be truthful with myself at any given point, on any given day.

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

The people is always expressive of the truth. The life of a people cannot be a lie.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

If we can't behave and speak in tune with our values, then they aren't really our values.

We didn't think much in the air corps of a fellow who wangled a cushy job out of his C.O. by buttering him up. It was hard for me to believe that God thought much of a man who tried to wangle salvation by fulsome flattery. I should have thought the worship most pleasing to him was to do your best according to your lights.

Beware of bartering the Word of God for a more suitable conception of your own.

Jewish authors would never have invented either that style nor that morality; and the Gospel has marks of truth so great, so striking, so utterly inimitable, that the invention of it would be more astonishing than the hero.

My worth to God in public is what I am in private.

Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents--these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures--are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.