Moral Effort Quotes

And if (as I said before) what we are matters even more than what we do - if, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are - then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And this applies to my good actions too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion, or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act? But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. ~ C.S. Lewis

I HAVE no patience with the hypothesis occasionally expressed, and often implied, especially in tales written to teach children to be good, that babies are born pretty much alike, and that the sole agencies in creating differences between boy and boy, and man and man, are steady application and moral effort. It is in the most unqualified manner that I object to pretensions of natural equality. The experiences of the nursery, the school, the University, and of professional careers, are a chain of proofs to the contrary. ~ Francis Galton

The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapuetic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period of time. ~ Carl Jung

So there is nothing inherently subversive about pleasure. On the contrary, as Karl Marx recognized, it is a thoroughly aristocratic creed. The traditional English gentleman was so averse to unpleasurable labour that he could not even be bothered to articulate properly. Hence the patrician slur and drawl, Aristotle believed that being human was something you had to get good at through constant practice, like learning Catalan or playing the bagpipes; whereas if the English gentleman was virtuous, as he occasionally deigned to be, his goodness was purely spontaneous. Moral effort was for merchants and clerks ~ Terry Eagleton

There are many instances in history of people who allow their skepticism to cut the nerve of moral effort, and there are numerous people, on the other hand, who are fierce crusaders at the price of fanaticism. In his political commitments the fanatic makes claims for his particular case which cannot be validated by either a transcendent Providence or a neutral posterity. ~ Elton Trueblood

Of course, figuring out what you like to work on doesn't mean you get to work on it. That's a separate question. And if you're ambitious you have to keep them separate: you have to make a conscious effort to keep your ideas about what you want from being contaminated by what seems possible.

It's painful to keep them apart, because it's painful to observe the gap between them. So most people pre-emptively lower their expectations. For example, if you asked random people on the street if they'd like to be able to draw like Leonardo, you'd find most would say something like "Oh, I can't draw." This is more a statement of intention than fact; it means, I'm not going to try. Because the fact is, if you took a random person off the street and somehow got them to work as hard as they possibly could at drawing for the next twenty years, they'd get surprisingly far. But it would require a great moral effort; it would mean staring failure in the eye every day for years. And so to protect themselves people say "I can't. ~ Paul Graham

There's no resolution to the conflicts of our lives within ourselves, no freedom from wickedness to be sought in striving, no peace with God which is the fruit of moral effort. And the reason why there is none is that we are, indeed, defeated by sin. It's not that we're occasionally overcome, or even that more often than not we lose the battle with ourselves. It's that we're wholly defeated, ruined, "there is no health in us." To look to ourselves, therefore, to try to sort ourselves out by doing an audit of our moral lives or a clean-up operation on our spirituality is, quite literally, a hopeless undertaking. ~ John Webster

Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort. ~ Stephen Leacock

The whole dead weight of my growing fear fell upon me and shook me. Then I burst out laughing too. It was the only thing to do: and the sound of my laughter also made me understand his. The strain of physical pressure caused it
this explosion of unnatural laughter in both of us; it was an effort of repressed forces to seek relief; it was a temporary safety-valve. ~ Algernon Blackwood

The state is not an organism capable of bringing either moral or material improvements to the populace ... but merely a vehicle of power for the men and party in power. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

Out of every fruition of success, no matter what, comes forth something to make a new effort necessary. ~ Walt Whitman

He did not want to fail, when the Bee Master had trusted him with the home and the possessions and the occupation that were all he had of his very own, and he did not know that as the storm drew nearer, as the clouds grew blacker, as the heat waves resolved themselves into definite flashes of lightning, as the night closed down black as velvet around him, he did not realize that his moral and mental forces were rising with the tide of the storm, that all the remnants of manhood left in his shaken body were gathering together for some sort of culmination, just as presently the storm would reach its height and then subside. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

My life is so much better, it's so much more enriched if I make the effort, if I actually celebrate with gladitude the fact that I get to be on this gorgeous planet. ~ RuPaul

Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous ~ Emily Bronte

Our founders did not believe that our society could thrive without this kind of moral social structure. In fact, it was our second president, John Adams, who said of our thoroughly researched and developed governing document, Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. ~ Ben Carson

We cannot, even given our most imaginative efforts, construct a concept of Self that does not impute some causal influence of prior mental states on later ones. ~ Jerome Bruner

Reality is based on your perception of the truth.

Think about that statement for a bit, it will blow your mind, and blow the lid of what you perceive to be real and what is an illusion.

You are here to live YOUR life, YOUR way and on YOUR terms, not for the people you work for, not the people in the media, and not to live in the little box that society may have placed you in.

You are a unique individual, with talents, with drive, with passion, with ambition, with love, with laughter, with a soul that could melt the hardest of hearts, and with a mind as creative as Da Vinci.

You chose this life for a reason, and it certainly wasn't to live a reality created by others. Is this the time to stand up, and say I can live my own reality, create what I want for my own life, have the things I want in life without guilt, knowing that you deserve anything you want and are prepared to put the time and effort into getting?

What if there was a way to bend your reality, a way to use your mind consciously to get what YOU want in life, become wealthy, feel comfortable in your own skin, meet the perfect man or woman, become more spontaneous, feel free, love, be open, be honest, be heartfelt, be grateful, be the one, love life, live, feel it, breathe it.... Welcome to Mind Alchemy Is this the time to Bend Your Reality? ~ Steven Aitchison

The men can have a moral compass that is just unshakeable, they can have ethics that run to the core. ~ Lupe Fiasco

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Of course, in fairness, I must remind you of this: that we writers are the most lily-livered of all craftsmen. We expect more, for the most peewee efforts, than any other people. ~ Brenda Ueland

The whole imaginative effort of Walt Whitman was really an effort to absorb and animate these multitudinous modern repetitions; and Walt Whitman would be quite capable of including in his lyric litany of optimism a list of the nine hundred and ninety-nine identical bathrooms. ~ G.K. Chesterton

No one's more dangerous than a man who's convinced of his own moral superiority. ~ Dean Koontz

… if we don't care enough about our own country to take care of it, then why should we expect anyone else to care?"

"The rest of the world still has a moral obligation to care…"

"All right, so the UK and the US should tell us again how to run our own country? Bring back colonialism? ~ Chinelo Okparanta

Do you feel no compunction, Socrates, at having followed a line of action which puts you in danger of the death penalty?'
I might fairly reply to him, 'You are mistaken, my friend, if you think that a man who is worth anything ought to spend his time weighing up the prospects of life and death. He has only one thing to consider in performing any action
that is, whether he is acting rightly or wrongly, like a good man or a bad one. ~ Socrates

Worry not so much about other peoples morals but more about your own. ~ James Cook

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. ~ Mark Twain

He's in the right, he's in the right!" she muttered; "of course he always is in the right, he is a Christian, he is magnanimous! Yes, a mean, horrid man! And no one but I understands or will understand it, and I cannot explain it. They say he's a religious, moral, honest, and wise man, but they do not see what I have seen. They do not know how for eight years he has been smothering my life, smothering everything that was alive in me, that he never once thought I was a live woman, in need of love. They do not know how at every step he hurt me and remained self-satisfied. Have I not tried to love him, tried to love my son when I could no longer love my husband? But the time came when I understood that I could no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, and cannot be blamed because God made me so, that I want to love and to live." … "And he knows it all; knows that I cannot repent of breathing, of loving, knows that nothing but lies and deception can come of this arrangement, but he wants to continue to torture me. I know him; I know that he swims and delights in falsehood as a fish in water. But no! I will not give him that pleasure, come what will. I will break this web of lies in which he wishes to entangle me. Anything is better than lies and deception! ~ Leo Tolstoy

The planter class took an additional precautionary step, a step that would later come to be known as a "racial bribe." Deliberately and strategically, the planter class extended special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge between them and black slaves. White settlers were allowed greater access to Native American lands, white servants were allowed to police slaves through slave patrols and militias, and barriers were created so that free labor would not be placed in competition with slave labor. These measures effectively eliminated the risk of future alliances between black slaves and poor whites. Poor whites suddenly had a direct, personal stake in the existence of a race-based system of slavery. ~ Michelle Alexander

Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight. ~ Bayard Rustin

Critics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues. ~ H. Wayne House

It seems perfectly clear that Economy, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science. There exists much prejudice against attempts to introduce the methods and language of mathematics into any branch of the moral sciences. Most persons appear to hold that the physical sciences form the proper sphere of mathematical method, and that the moral sciences demand some other method-I know not what. ~ William Stanley Jevons

Any effort ... to make the obscure obvious is likely to be unappealing, for the penalty of failure is confusion while the reward of success is banality. ~ Nelson Goodman

Of course, motivating yourself has little to do with energy - and everything to do with decisions.
Choosing to do something, especially if it seems difficult, might be hard. You need to decide whether the task is worth the effort. ~ Gina Barreca

I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts. ~ Joseph Haydn

I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. ~ Henry David Thoreau

He was really, Lily Briscoe thought, in spite of his eyes, but then look at his nose, look at his hands, the most uncharming human being she had ever met. Then why did she mind what he said? Women can't write, women can't paint - what did that matter coming from him, since clearly it was not true to him but for some reason helpful to him, and that was why he said it? Why did her whole being bow, like corn under a wind, and erect itself again from this abasement only with a great and rather painful effort? She must make it once more. There's the sprig on the table-cloth; there's my painting; I must move the tree to the middle; that matters - nothing else. Could she not hold fast to that, she asked herself, and not lose her temper, and not argue; and if she wanted revenge take it by laughing at him? ~ Virginia Woolf

I like it when people make an effort to wear things that you wouldn't normally put together - I like eccentrics. ~ Bat For Lashes

Saving Milly was a break from this effort because I felt that it was time to be part of something that could shed light on a disease everyone feels they know, when most know so little. ~ Madeleine Stowe

Can't you try>? However useless the effort may seem to you to be, have you anything better to do with your life? Have you some worthier goal? Have you a purpose that will justify you in your own eyes to some greater extent? ~ Isaac Asimov

Not only is state violence rarely prosecuted as criminal, it is not commonly perceived as violence. Because the state is granted the moral and legal authority over those who fall under its jurisdiction, it is granted a monopoly over the use of violence in society, so the use of violence is generally seen as legitimate. ~ Robyn Maynard

I started out to be honest,
with everything on the square.
But a man can't fool with the Golden Rule
in a crowd that won't play fair.

You don't go down with a hard, short fall,
you just sort of shuffle along.
And loosen your load of the moral code,
'till you can't tell right from wrong. ~ Clarence Leonard Hay

When the only form of cultural commentary Christians offer is moral condemnation, no wonder we come across to non-believers as angry and scolding. ~ Nancy Pearcey

Meanwhile, the state has grown as addicted to the lottery as its problem gamblers. Lottery proceeds now account for 13 percent of the state revenues in Massachusetts, making radical change all but unthinkable. No politician, however troubled by the lottery's harmful effects, would dare raise taxes or cut spending sufficiently to offset the revenue the lottery brings in. With states hooked on the money, they have no choice but to continue to bombard their citizens, especially the most vulnerable ones, with a message at odds with the ethic of work, sacrifice and moral responsibility that sustains democratic life. This civic corruption is the gravest harm that lotteries bring. It degrades the public realm by casting the government as the purveyor of a perverse civic education. To keep the money flowing, state governments across American must now use their authority and influence not to cultivate civic virtue but to peddle false hope. They must persuade their citizens that with a little luck they can escape the world of work to which only misfortune cosigns them. ~ Michael J. Sandel

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Reading good books strengthens the moral fabric of society. ~ HBR Patel