Graham Greene Quotes

I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.

Sometimes you're going to be faced with situations where the line isn't clear between what's right and what's wrong.Your heart will tell you to do one thing and your brain will tell you to do something different. In the end, all that's left is to look at both sides and go with your best judgment.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

The battle between good and evil is endlessly fascinating because we are participants every day.

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.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

It was a morally representative act. Helms withheld the information because it would have cost him his job.

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.

I wanted to write a book about people who have the best intentions and think - really, truly think - that they're doing the right thing. And then they realize that when those ideals come knocking at their windowsill, a lot of times they will suddenly disavow those ideals.

I care about hurting other people because, well, I don't want to hurt people - well, I do sometimes, but I still don't.

As I heard out people who had done others wrong, I'd often wonder how a human allows his or her better judgement to override their conscience. When I share these feelings with my friends, they say, 'Everyone isn't like you.' But I think it's easy to assert your better feelings and not allow the darker side to dominate your personality.

What's stronger-the need to uphold the law, or the motive to turn one's back on it?

Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim - not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.

Conscience is the voice of the soul, the passions are the voice of the body. It is strange that these voices often contradict each other?

Guilt agonizes over trifles, ignores habitual wrongdoing.

Oh, Conscience! Conscience! man's most faithful friend, Him canst thou comfort, ease, relieve, defend; But if he will thy friendly checks forego, Thou art, oh! woe for me, his deadliest foe!

Conscience is a just but weak judge. Weakness leaves it powerless to execute its judgment.

I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings.

It is easy to be just when our own inclinations do not oppose it.

Alanna didn't approve of lying, but in a pinch a lie was sometimes better than the truth.

Conscience whispers, but interest screams aloud.

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

In suffocating the voice of conscience, passion carries with itself a restlessness of the body and the senses: it is the restlessness of the "external man." When the internal man has been reduced to silence, then passion, once it has been given freedom of action, so to speak, exhibits itself as an insistent tendency to satisfy the senses and the body.

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.

Now, we don't really believe these things - intellectually we know better - but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what's actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.