Moral Purpose Quotes

#1. The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#2. As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief ... without moral purpose or human interest.

Archibald MacLeish

#3. The moral purpose of every human life should be to attain happiness through service to humanity.

Debasish Mridha

#4. I've never actually seen the military used to any higher moral purpose. There is always the bottom line, somewhere, somehow.

Stan Goff

#5. A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Alan Furst

#6. To elevate the goals of humankind, to achieve high moral purpose, to realize major intended change, leaders must thrust themselves into the most intractable processes and structures of history and ultimately master them.

James MacGregor Burns

#7. If leaders don't know how to put their words into action, if they follow the wrong paths and take the wrong turns, then their sense of moral purpose can quickly give way to cynicism, frustration, and fading commitment.

Viviane Robinson

#8. Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values.

Ayn Rand

#9. Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids.

Aristotle.

#10. Science in England, in America, is jealous of theory, hates the name of love and moral purpose. There's revenge for this humanity.What manner of man does science make? The boy is not attracted. He says, I do not wish to be such a kind of man as my professor is.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#11. The process of gaining power employs means which degrade or brutalize the seeker, who awakes to find that power has been possessed at the cost of virtue or moral purpose lost.

Barbara W. Tuchman

#12. Other men used their effete faiths and mean faculties with a high moral purpose. The Venetian gave the most earnest faith, and the lordliest faculty, to gild the shadows of an antechamber, or heighten the splendours of a holiday.

John Ruskin

#13. 'Peace on earth, good will toward men' - democracy must cling to that message. For it is my deep conviction that democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and moral purpose.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#14. If we are to give our utmost effort and skill and enthusiasm, we must believe in ourselves, which means believing in our past and in our future, in our parents and in our children, in that particular blend of moral purpose and practical inventiveness which is the American character.

Margaret Mead

#15. Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.

T.R. Fehrenbach

#16. Many writers lay very great stress upon some definite moral purpose, at which they profess to aim their works.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#17. What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).

David Brooks

#18. What I've learned is that the muses' decision to sing or not to sing is not based on the elevation of your moral purpose - they will sing or not, regardless.

John Barth

#19. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Ayn Rand

#20. Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#21. What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. (1355b 17)

Aristotle.

#22. Leadership is an unlimited resource and as such, is a lifelong pursuit of learning. That learning must be to transform 'leader of position' to 'leadership with moral purpose'.

Hilarie Owen

#23. Poetry has historically been allied with religion and morals; it has served the purpose of penetrating the mysterious depths of things.

John Dewey

#24. 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

#25. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has a more direct bearing on the moral choices made by individuals or the purposes pursued by society than belief or disbelief in God.

Ravi Zacharias

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

Peter Singer

#27. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.

George Inness

#28. Whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its member to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does!

Daniel Dennett

#29. Art is self-sufficient and need serve no moral or political purpose

Walter Pater

#30. The purpose of a moral philosophy is not to look delightfully strange and counterintuitive or to provide employment to bioethicists. The purpose is to guide our choices toward life, health, beauty, happiness, fun, laughter, challenge, and learning.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#31. We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose-the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

#32. My main goal in this book is to deconstruct the concept of the Jewish "historical right" to the Land of Israel and its associated nationalist narratives, whose only purpose was to establish moral legitimacy for the appropriation of territory.

Shlomo Sand

#33. I look forward to a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose

John F. Kennedy

#34. The responsibility of the executive is (1) to create and maintain a sense of purpose and moral code for the organization; (2) to establish systems of formal and informal communication; and (3) to ensure the willingness of people to cooperate.

Chester Barnard

#35. The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Norman Mailer

#36. 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

#37. Happiness is not synonymous with pleasure. It is, instead, a deeper emotion that originates from within ... Happiness results from a sense of mental and moral contentment with who we are, what we value, and how we invest our time and resources for purposes beyond ourselves.

David Shi

#38. At my first press conference I was asked whether we could trust the Soviet Union, and I said that the answer to that question could be found in the writings of Soviet leaders: It had always been their philosophy that it was moral to lie or cheat for the purpose of advancing Communism.

Ronald Reagan

#39. LIFE is that existence that is given to man to live for a purpose, to live to his own satisfaction and pleasure, providing he forgets not the God who created him and who expects a spiritual obedience and observation of the moral laws that He has inspired.

Marcus Garvey

#40. It's increasingly apparent that the absence of purpose - or of a moral language - within government, media or business, could become one of the most dangerous own goals for capitalism and for freedom.

Elisabeth Murdoch

#41. America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle," he said. "We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.

George W. Bush

#42. And suddenly I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and by the singleness of its purpose.

Joseph Conrad

#43. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man's attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.

Viktor E. Frankl

#44. You keep waiting for the moral of your life to become obvious, but it never does. Work, work, work: No moral. No plot. No eureka! Just production schedules and days. You might as well be living inside a photocopier. Your lives are all they're ever going to be.

Douglas Coupland

#45. Anything that becomes a cult, or a mass movement, loses its moral and spiritual value. The crusade has to be personal, individual. As soon as it becomes collective it loses its purpose.

Rosamond Lehmann

#46. Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#47. Racism is not simply about one man's irrational hatred of another but his self-hatred, doubting his own moral goodness and purpose.

Michael R. French

#48. As a club, we have an educational purpose: to give back to those people who love Arsenal so that they learn moral values from our game and how we behave.

Arsene Wenger

#49. The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.

Muhammad Iqbal

#50. Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.

Immanuel Kant

#51. To have a moral sense is not to be dogmatic in dealing with rules. It can be an open way with dealing with questions of objectives and purpose, which is completely different.

Tariq Ramadan

#52. ...in its practical purpose the footpath of freedom is the only one on which it is possible to make use of reason in our conduct. Hence it is as impossible for the subtlest philosophy as for the commonest reasoning to argue freedom away.

Immanuel Kant

#53. People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology. Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview.

Mitt Romney

#54. If somebody has an extreme amount of wealth and is not using it for some good purpose, only for their own enjoyment or satisfaction, then clearly there's a moral failing in the world in which we live.

Peter Singer

#55. A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Julia Glass

#56. It was an interesting thing to do. Why did I write any of my books, after all? For the sake of the pleasure, for the sake of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message; I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles with elegant solutions.

Vladimir Nabokov

#57. Games have been called the lab for the development of moral attributes, but they will not, of themselves, accomplish this purpose. They must be properly conducted by competent individuals.

James Naismith

#58. The best we can do is strive to minimize the amount of harm we cause by living. We need to eat in order to live, and there is no moral or ethical code that dictates that we should refrain from eating and allow ourselves to die for some higher purpose.

Sharon Gannon

#59. The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.

John Stuart Mill

#60. If an artist is driven primarily by social responsibility, I think the art probably suffers because, again, just as leadership has a rather defined end point or purpose, social responsibility would seem to have a very clear moral context.

Billy Collins

#61. A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?

Lord Byron

#62. 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