Moral Insight Quotes

Wisdom is a sacred communion.

The irrationality of disgust suggests it is unreliable as a source of moral insight. There may be good arguments against gay marriage, partial-birth abortions and human cloning, but the fact that some people find such acts to be disgusting should carry no weight.

It is not the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discovered; but very often an action of small note. An casual remark or joke shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.

Grant, then, to Your servant an understanding mind to judge Your people, to distinguish between good and bad; for who can judge this vast people of yours?

Wisdom is the capacity to see things from God's viewpoint.

He who does not see the angels and devils in the beauty and malice of life will be far removed from knowledge, and his spirit will be empty of affection.

Wisdom is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

God sees hearts as we see faces.

Pride, like humility, is destroyed by one's insistence that he possesses it.

To judge human character rightly, a man may sometimes have very small experience, provided he has a very large heart.

I do not distinguish by the eye, but by the mind, which is the proper judge of the man.

What I intended to accomplish was to rouse the student body, not by means of an organization, but solely by my simple words; to urge them, not to violence, but to moral insight into the existing serious deficiencies of our political system.

Trauma reflected upon in tranquility can produce morally stunning insights - literary light! It can also produce maudlin rubbish.

Works of art cannot save us. They can simply render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired.

It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds there is not always an indication of virtue or vice, indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.

In describing someone's character, I reveal my own.

The writer's gift can make us see ourselves and our morals differently than our reality suggests.

I have met a thousand scamps; but I never met one who considered himself so. Self-knowledge isn't so common.

Morality, when vigorously alive, sees farther than intellect, and provides unconsciously for intellectual difficulties.

Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.

Justice without wisdom is impossible.

I must listen as God speaks to my soul through good thoughts, inspirations, and intuitions.

False judges are held up in the world's admiration and I alone know the true ones.

To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful.

It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind's eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed himself as he did now.