Ernest Renan Quotes

You can do whatever you want to do as long as it is correct according to your conscience and heart.

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

Morality has nothing to do with such a man as I am.

Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him.

Morality pertains only to the sphere of man's free will - only to those actions which are open to his choice.

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would call that the right thing. That's how most people thought.

Integrity in the Moment of Choice: Quality of life depends on what happens in the space between stimulus and response.

I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.

Live with honor and follow your conscience.

I followed my heart without breaking any rules.

True freedom is not the liberty to do anything we please, but the liberty to do what we ought; and it is genuine liberty because doing what we ought now pleases us

Integrity is the courage and self-discipline to cooperate and initiate according to the Divine, which you know in your heart as Truth.

Most of us follow our conscience as we follow a wheelbarrow. We push it in front of us in the direction we want to go.

Morality is nothing but a struggle for safety

There's a morality... I think there's a moral compass but whether that comes from religion or just from being a good person, and where one starts and the other begins... I'm a good person, I hope. But I'm never as good as I want to be, never as nice as I want to be, never as generous as I want to be.

Integrity is the factor that determines which one will prevail. We struggle daily with situations that demand decisions between what we want to do and what we ought to do. Integrity establishes the ground rules for resolving these tensions. it determines who we are and how we will respond before the conflict even appears. Integrity welds what we say, think, and do, into a whole person so that permission is never granted for one of these to be out of sync.

Faith teaches that there is a right and wrong beyond mere opinion or desire. Most importantly, it teaches us that freedom is not an end in itself, that how freedom is exercised matters as much as freedom itself

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

The key to acting with integrity is to simply stop playing the game.

We must do what we conceive to be the right thing, and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we are going to be successful. Because if we don't do the right thing, we'll be doing the wrong thing, and we will just be part of the disease, and not a part of the cure.

I only knew that there was a certain rightness in life--the feeling you got when you did something the way you knew you should.

Moral autonomy appears when the mind regards as necessary an ideal that is independent of all external pressures.

Some persons follow the dictates of their conscience only in the same sense in which a coachman may be said to follow the horses he is driving.

The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.

Some things are right, whether nobody sees you doing them or not.