Even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old.
Collectivism, as an intellectual power and a moral ideal, is dead. But freedom and individualism, and their political expression, capitalism, have not yet been discovered.
Christianity is the highest perfection of humanity.
Be such a man, and live such a life, that if every man were such as you, and every life a life like yours, this earth would be God's Paradise.
To commit the least possible sin is the law for man. To live without sin is the dream of an angel. Everything terrestrial is subject to sin. Sin is a gravitation.
Art is the indispensable medium for the communication of a moral ideal.
Freedom was my first great desire. The second, which remains hidden within me to this day, tormenting me, was the desire for sanctity. Hero together with saint: such is mankind's supreme model.
People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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.
The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole.
We have never stopped sin by passing laws; and in the same way, we are not going to take a great moral ideal and achieve it merely by law.
His [Theodore Roosevelt’s] chief faults … are three: impatience of the interval between desire and accomplishment; failure to appreciate the persistence of a moral ideal as distinguished from a wise or expedient purpose; and overconfidence in the disposition of the popular mind to consider fine distinctions in passing on a broad issue.
The ideal of morality has no more dangerous rival than the ideal of highest strength, of most powerful life. It is the maximum of the savage.
