William Faulkner Quotes

If you do not know the laws of right conduct, you cannot form your character.

I think we're innately good. But it doesn't mean we're gonna do good all the time. It means you have to strive.

Ethics are more important than laws. Which means that the exact note is less important than the feeling of the note.

If we desire rules to govern our spiritual development we turn back to the Sermon on the Mount.

God gave these ten laws for our good. He wants us to be our very best and to get the most that is possible our of life.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don't need religion.

Prayer provides an opportunity to remind oneself of how one should be living, our responsibilities to others, our own failings, and our relative good fortune, should we have it. This is, I think, a pretty worthwhile practice and it is not something you can only do if you believe you are talking to an unseen creator.

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

There is no system that is inherently moral if the participants themselves are not.

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.

Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it's not the origin of it.

I believe in pursuing my own morality. That is all I have ever stuck by. It is my own morality that really matters.

To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.

Preach in your own house and to your own company

We're constantly rationalizing where we stand and our own code and dealing with, you know, how you can be the best version of yourself.

Without God, for me, I'm not the best version of myself.

There’s no such thing as 'one, true way’; the only answers worth having are the ones you find for yourself; leave the world better than you found it. Love, freedom, and the chance to do some good — they’re the things worth living and dying for, and if you aren’t willing to die for the things worth living for, you might as well turn in your membership in the human race.

Without the church it's like having a boat without the rudder. You think you can do it on your own and this may sound pedestrian or trite but I'll equate it to this: all my life I've been involved with exercise but no matter how much - and I know a great deal about the body - you need help. You need a trainer. You need to go to a gym and you need to have the expertise and the guidance of someone else. You cannot train yourself. I feel the same way about Christianity and what the church is. The church is the gym of the soul.

It's a morality that keeps humans human.

The impulse which directs to right conduct, and deters from crime, is not only older than the ages of nations and cities, but coeval with that Divine Being who sees and rules both heaven and earth.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.

And my haunting instinct that somehow good was not merely a tool to be used, but a relic to be guarded, like the goods from Crusoe's ship--even that had been the wild whisper of something originally wise, for, according to Christianity, we were indeed the survivors of a wreck, the crew of a golden ship that had gone down before the beginning of the world.

It is belief in the Bible, the fruits of deep meditation, which has served me as the guide of my moral and literary life. I have found capital safely invested and richly productive of interest, although I have sometimes made but a bad use of it.

Morality is the fruit of religion: to desire the former without the latter is to desire an orange without an orange-tree.