Moral Meaning Quotes

#1. Give me life, with its struggles and victories, with its failures and hatreds, with its deep moral meaning and its unknown goal!

E. M. Forster

#2. And I got to thinking about the moral meaning of memory, per se. And what it means to forget, what it means to fail to find and preserve the connection with the dead whose lives you, or I, want or need to honor with our own.

June Jordan

#3. The slogan 'Never Again!' that emerged after the Holocaust implies that the Holocaust has a universal moral meaning, which, if properly learned, can provide at least a theoretical prophylactic against its repetition against anyone.

David Novak

#4. Our best moral stories don't tell us what is right or wrong in every situation, but they show us what one character did in one situation at one time. Readers, viewers, and listeners are supposed to extrapolate the moral meaning from the story. We're not supposed to have it handed to us.

Jonathan D. Fitzgerald

#5. No Government has the moral authority to dismantle the universally understood meaning of marriage.

Keith O'Brien

#6. It is possible that the meaning of wisdom in Hebrew indicates aptitude for stratagems and the application of thought in such a way that the stratagems and ruses may be used in achieving either rational or moral virtues, or in achieving skill in a practical art, or in working evil and wickedness.

Maimonides

#7. The Fourth Industrial Revolution can compromise humanity's traditional sources of meaning - work, community, family, and identity - or it can lift humanity into a new collective and moral consciousness based on a sense of shared destiny. The choice is ours.

Klaus Schwab

#8. To say that life is meaningless is to express an attitude, not to state a fact

Peter Singer

#9. The uncertain and imprecise way of constructing a drawing is sometimes a model of how to construct meaning ... The ethical and moral questions ... in our heads seem to rise to the surface as a consequence of the process

William Kentridge

#10. I remember arguing that moral greatness had little meaning without action to effect the moral end.

Geraldine Brooks

#11. When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning
and we will not be free again until we get it back.

Alan Keyes

#12. If by any chance a playwright wishes to express a political opinion or a moral opinion or a philosophy, he must be a good enough craftsman to do it with so much spice of entertainment in it that the public get the message without being aware of it.

Noel Coward

#13. ... it is not just that moral conclusions can not be justified in the way that they once were ; but the loss of the possibility of such justification signals a correlative change in the meaning of moral idioms

Alasdair MacIntyre

#14. We Americans are too often like children, steeped in moral tales that lack complexity and nuanced meaning.

(from the foreword in The War I survived Was Vietnam by Michael Uhl)

Steve Rees

#15. Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition.

Paul Kurtz

#16. Moral' means one is free to enjoy only the things that belong to him and those he receives naturally and spontaneously. That is the ultimate meaning of morality.

Dada Bhagwan

#17. When people commit themselves to a certain vision of reality, it becomes their ultimate explainer. It serves to interpret the universe for them, to guide their moral decisions, to give meaning and purpose to life, and all the other functions normally associated with a religion.

Nancy Pearcey

#18. The first forty years of our life give the text, the next thirty furnish the commentary upon it, which enables us rightly to understand the true meaning and connection of the text with its moral and its beauties.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#19. Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

Stephen Jay Gould

#20. Theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich characterizes anxiety into three categories: "ontic anxiety" is the fear of fate and death. The second is "moral anxiety," from guilt, or condemnation. The third is "spiritual anxiety," prompted by an empty life, without direction or meaning.

Caitlin Moran

#21. All the moral laws are readily translated into natural philosophy, for often we have only to restore the primitive meaning of thewords by which they are expressed, or to attend to their literal instead of their metaphorical sense. They are already supernatural philosophy.

Henry David Thoreau

#22. If everyone realized the value of life, the world would be peaceful. The meaning of these words, "Do unto others as you would have them, do unto you," would be understood: It would be practiced.

Ellen J. Barrier

#23. The meaning of service is to do the work assigned ungrudgingly and without thought of personal reward material or moral.

D.T. Suzuki

#24. Most people need, at least, a very strong ethical training. They tend to lack basic moral. And it's a waste of time to teach very important universal rules to someone that doesn't understand the meaning of helping others or feeling empathy for them.

Robin Sacredfire

#25. Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning.

Mitt Romney

#26. The meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future. The claim that we would not have morals or ethics without religion is extraordinary. Animals in nature seem to behave in moral ways without organized religion.

Bill Nye

#27. The words of musicals were the moral codes that I lived by. I found meaning and messages in musicals that I didn't find in churches or school books and it really made me come alive in a way.

Rosie O'Donnell

#28. But for all its benefits in offering moral guidance and meaning in life, in today's secular world religion alone is no longer adequate as a basis for ethics.

Dalai Lama XIV

#29. A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

George Bernard Shaw

#30. Man is a tragic animal. Not because of his smallness, but because he is too well endowed. Man has longings and spiritual demands that reality cannot fulfill. We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in a meaningless world.

Peter Wessel Zapffe

#31. Love may not lead where we think or hope, but regardless of outcome it should be a call to seriousness and truth. If it is not that - if it is not moral in its effect - then love is no more than an exaggerated form of pleasure.

Julian Barnes

#32. Paul," he said, "do you think my life has meaning? Did I make the right choices?"

It was stunning: even someone I considered a moral examplar had these questions in the face of mortality.

Paul Kalanithi

#33. Since long ago all peoples have recognized that the world, apart from its physical meaning, also has a moral one. Yet everywhere the matter has only come to a vague consciousness, which, as it sought expression, clothed itself in all sorts of images and myths. There are religions.

Arthur Schopenhauer

#34. There's no theme, no moral to be learned, except for the knowledge that lightning can strike from a clear blue sky one morning and take away everything you've built, everything you've counted on, leaving wreckage and no meaning behind. It can happen to anyone, it can happen to you.

Damon Galgut

#35. It is not the armed forces which can protect our democracy. It is the moral strength of democracy which alone can give any meaning to the efforts at military security.

Max Lerner

#36. Morality, like other inputs into the social process, follows the law of diminishing returns- meaning ultimately, negative returns. People can be too moral.

Thomas Sowell

#37. It is those moral and spiritual qualities which rise alone in free men, which will fulfill the meaning of the word American. And with them will come centuries of further greatness to our country.

Herbert Hoover

#38. Progress, properly understood, has, indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous.

G.K. Chesterton

#39. A noble journey through the travails of time calls for a person to disregard conventional social, cultural, and moral contexts and strive to cleave a personal meaning that guides their existence.

Kilroy J. Oldster

#40. Morality is not just any old topic in psychology but close to our conception of the meaning of life. Moral goodness is what gives each of us the sense that we are worthy human beings.

Steven Pinker

#41. If moral values amount to nothing but subjective phenomena of the human mind without independent meaning and existence - a position held by a variety of naturalist, positivist, and pragmatist philosophers - one never can be found lacking in light of an objective standard of moral values.

Reinhard Hutter

#42. The meaning ascribed in popular usage to the word 'selfishness' is not merely wrong: it represents a devastating intellectual 'package-deal,' which is responsible, more than any other single factor, for the arrested moral development of mankind.

Ayn Rand

#43. Ostracism makes individuals feel they lack purpose, have less control over their lives, are less good moral beings, and lack self-worth. Those high school cliques aren't uniquely adolescent experiences: Human beings hate being left out. We conform because to do so seems to give our life meaning.

Anonymous