Garth Stein Quotes

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

My vocabulary is adequate for writing notes and keeping journals but absolutely useless for an active moral life.

I consider myself a fairly ethical individual while I do have a lot of dichotomies within me. We're all victims of our own hypocrisy at times.

I'd prefer to be good, but I'm not always. I struggle.

I've always wanted to do right in life. But the wanting and the doing aren't quite the same thing.

I've always believed in people's capacity for goodness. I still believe that people are good. What I'm not so trusting about anymore is their relationship to their own goodness.

I'm interested in writing that explores all sides of human beings.

Being an actor sometimes requires that you ask yourself questions you'd rather not know the answers to.

I believe you have to nurture your conscience.

Everybody is grappling with their own moral compass, and that needle, like any needle, can't just stick. It's always floating a little bit, and depending on where you're standing, it's hard to read.

My success at living a moral life is pretty terrible, but I still aspire to do it! I identify with the Johnny Cash thing that trying to live a good life and be a good person are not necessarily the same thing!

I'm a good person. In most ways. But I'm beginning to think that being a good person in most ways doesn't count for anything very much, if you're a bad person in one way.

In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it's about self-confrontation.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

Four be the things I'd have been better without: love, curiosity, freckles and doubt.

Am I getting nobler, better, more helpful, more humble, as I get older? Am I exhibiting the life that men take knowledge of as having been with Jesus, or am I getting more self-assertive, more deliberately determined to have my own way? It is a great thing to tell yourself the truth.

A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.

Conscience was the barmaid of the Victorian soul. Recognizing that human beings were fallible and that their failings, though regrettable, must be humored, conscience would permit, rather ungraciously perhaps, the indulgence of a number of carefully selected desires.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

I've gone through a lot of different phases on what I do and why I do it - morally and ethically. I've tortured myself about it, especially in dealing with success and money.

I nod, because I do understand. I'm just not sure how to go about divorcing myself from the evil I've already accepted.

The difficult thing for me is that I want basically to be a good man. That's what I want to be.

In all of us, there is a struggle between the good and the bad. It makes it more palpable and real to play such people as an actor.

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

I think you're not a human being unless you have doubts and fears.