Quotes About Rectitude

#1. Religion is faith in an infinite Creator, who delights in and enjoins that rectitude which conscience commands us to seek. This conviction gives a Divine sanction to duty.

William Ellery Channing

#2. I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

Lord Acton

#3. But I trust in my faith that we are descendants of rectitude. That each of us, no matter how bad we may think ourselves to be, the core lining of us is threaded in holy fibers.

E.K. Blair

#4. If ultimately there was a tantalizing rectitude about her, she was none the less cunning: her exceeding gentleness, howbeit mitigated sometimes by the disturbing oppressiveness that foretells a storm in the air, left me utterly blind.

Georges Bataille

#5. A reputation for good judgment, for fair dealing, for truth, and for rectitude, is itself a fortune.

Henry Ward Beecher

#6. The mind that's conscious of its rectitude,
Laughs at the lies of rumor.

Ovid

#7. For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.

Joe Klein

#8. Let not sleep fall upon thy eyes till thou has thrice reviewed the transactions of the past day. Where have I turned aside from rectitude? What have I been doing? What have I left undone, which I ought to have done?

Pythagoras

#9. Respect, Honesty, Courage, Rectitude, Loyalty, Honour, Benevolence

Tsunetomo Yamamoto

#10. Neither liberal nor conservative politicians can resist the temptation to stand as mighty sequoias of rectitude amid the lowly underbrush of fundraising.

P. J. O'Rourke

#11. We may succeed in preserving a modicum of rectitude in the performance of our public duty, but behind this facade lurk violent and sinful emotions, which are always threatening to erupt.

John R.W. Stott

#12. Unskilled in sophistry and new to the darker ways of national politics, Grover Cleveland faced his accusers, his slanderers, and his judges, the sovereign people, conscious of the general rectitude of his life, and courageously determined to bear the burdens of his sins in so far as guilt was his.

Grover Cleveland

#13. He was a man in the prime of his life, his fifties ... broad forehead, aquiline nose, penetrating gaze, the very soul of rectitude and goodness.

Mario Vargas-Llosa

#14. As down the centuries, a few men stand in lonely rectitude that we may look and say, there is a human race behind us.

Ayn Rand

#15. His sense of duty, honor, rectitude. What made me want to scream one day could make me proud the next.

Siri Hustvedt

#16. In the sublimest flights of the soul, rectitude is never surmounted, love is never outgrown.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#17. Liberalism is a religion. Its tenets cannot be proved, its capacity for waste and destruction demonstrated. But it affords a feeling of spiritual rectitude at little or no cost.

David Mamet

#18. For the good [person] to realize that it is better to be whole than to be good is to enter on a strait and
narrow path compared to which his [or her] previous rectitude was flowery license.

Parker J. Palmer

#19. Understand that when the beast within you
succeeds again in paralyzing into unending
incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make
its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its
rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you.

Frank Bidart

#20. Rectitude is a perpetual victory, celebrated not by cries of joy but by serenity, which is joy fixed or habitual.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#21. Never do a thing concerning the rectitude of which you are in doubt.

Pliny The Younger

#22. To speak in literature with the perfect rectitude and insouciance of the movements of animals and the unimpeachable of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside is the flawless triumph of art.

Walt Whitman

#23. Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.

Origen

#24. Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.

George Eliot

#25. I know not whether, in the eyes of the world, a brilliant death is not preferred to an obscure life of rectitude. Most men are remembered as they died, and not as they lived. We gaze with admiration upon the glories of the setting sun, yet scarcely bestow a passing glance upon its noonday splendor.

Davy Crockett

#26. Bushido refers not only to martial rectitude but personal rectitude. We understand that in serving each other we serve our own interests.
In serving our world, our world serves us. Allowing us to live in harmony with it.

Rick Remender

#27. The city fathers discredited themselves with their silly exercise in extreme social rectitude.

Mel Gordon

#28. The very uprightness of the pines and maples asserts the ancient rectitude and vigor of nature. Our lives need the relief of such a background, where the pine flourishes and the jay still screams.

Henry David Thoreau

#29. Men want to be reminded, who do not want to be taught; because those original ideas of rectitude to which the mind is compelled to assent when they are proposed, are not always as present to us as they ought to be.

Edmund Burke

#30. To have done no man a wrong ... to walk and live, unseduced, within arm's length of what is not your own, with nothing between your desire and its gratification but the invisible law of rectitude - this is to be a man

Orison Swett Marden

#31. Even in the fiercest uproar of our stormy passions, conscience, though in her softest whispers, gives to the supremacy of rectitude the voice of an undying testimony.

Thomas Chalmers

#32. Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.

Wade Davis

#33. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Tim O'Brien

#34. He looked down the slope and, at the base, in the shadow of the wall of the Park, he saw some human figures lying. Those venal and furtive loves filled him with despair. He gnawed the rectitude of his life; he felt that he had been outcast from life's feast.

James Joyce

#35. Do those people who hold up the Bible as an inspiration to
moral rectitude have the slightest notion of what is actually written
in it?

Richard Dawkins

#36. I distrust the slightest hint of a standard for political rectitude, knowing that it will open the way for persons in authority to set arbitrary standards of human behavior.

E.B. White

#37. Just as the apparent openness of rectitude will have its hidden places where foul things moulder in the dark, so, in the shadowed lives of those outside the law may sometimes be found concealed honesty and naive ideals.

William McIlvanney

#38. Permit me then to recommend from the sincerity of my heart, ready at all times to bleed in my country's cause, a Declaration of Independence, and call upon the world and the Great God who governs it to witness the necessity, propriety and rectitude thereof.

Nathanael Greene

#39. The most dangerous diminutions of freedom come from those who are convinced of their moral rectitude.

Daniel Hannan

#40. Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.

Christopher Morley

#41. The people who must never have power are the humorless. To impossible certainties of rectitude they ally tedium and uniformity.

Christopher Hitchens

#42. The only guide to a man's conscience, the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions.

Winston Churchill

#43. The sense of historical continuity, and a feeling for philosophical rectitude cannot, however, be compromised.

Herbert Read

#44. Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; benevolence indulged beyond measure sinks into weakness.

Date Masamune

#45. There is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle.

Joseph Conrad

#46. The mind, conscious of rectitude, laughed to scorn the falsehood of report.

Ovid

#47. The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.

David Brooks

#48. How dare you, unless you can hold up your own life as a model of rectitude, achievement, and halcyon happiness, open your mouth about the stubborn secrets of living?

Celestine Sibley

#49. Liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor; and more and more in the modern world, large business rests on rectitude and honor as well as on good judgment.

Charles William Eliot

#50. Justice is a certain rectitude of mind whereby a man does what he ought to do in the circumstances confronting him.

Thomas Aquinas

#51. I love the idea of rectitude.

Rob Morrow

#52. Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego.

Richard M. Weaver

#53. We cannot live better than in seeking to become better.

Socrates

#54. Samurai are born to die.
Death is not a curse to be avoided
but the natural end of all life. Death is not eternal ... dishonor is.

Rick Remender