Bjornstjerne Bjornson Quotes

Children often have a much stronger concept of morality than adults.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.

Those ethical choices often are made every day at a time, minute by minute in ways that you may not even relate to ethics, so I'm going to walk them through the whole story from that perspective and hopefully they'll be able to walk away with something good from it.

The first idea the child must acquire is that of the difference between good and evil.

I try not to do anything that's immoral.

Morals are an acquirement -- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis -- no man is born with them.

I'd like to write a series that, in an adventurous and fun way, teaches kids a way to discern between good and evil, to establish a foundation on moral absolutes.

Morality must relate, at some level, to the well-being of conscious creatures. If there are more and less effective ways for us to seek happiness and to avoid misery in this world - and there clearly are - then there are right and wrong answers to questions of morality.

Conscience has no more to do with gallantry than it has with politics.

I'm not any more moral than my neighbors.

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning - an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

One has only as much morality as one has philosophy and poetry.

Conscience is a man's compass.

I'd forgotten it's an important thing to give thought to your morality and how you intend to live your life.

I think that unless you can take judgments of right and wrong like an automaton, you must have emotions because that is our only way of moral guidance.

Conscience without judgment is superstition.

If you want young people to take right and wrong seriously, you must put them in the presence of people who take right and wrong seriously.

Our system of morals is a body of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose.

That a science, which distinguishes the criterions of right and wrong; which teaches to establish the one, and prevent, punish, or redress the other; which employs in its theory the noblest faculties of the soul, and exerts in its practice the cardinal virtues of the heart; a science, which is universal in its use and extent, accommodated to each individual, yet comprehending the whole community; that a science like this should ever have been deemed unnecessary to be studied in an university, is matter of astonishment and concern.

There is nothing in the whole frame of man which seems to me so unaccountable as that thing called conscience.

I have a moral conscience that is real central.

I always try to follow my moral compass.

You have to follow your moral compass: it's a good guide of telling you what is right and wrong.