Gunter Grass Quotes

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Be good only if being bad ain't more fun.

Liberty is the essential precondition for achieving virtue... In order to exercise virtue, we need to have the ability to choose freely.

In a free society, it is hard for 'good' people to do 'good', but that is a small price to pay for making it hard for 'evil' people to do 'evil', especially since one man's good is another's evil

You can't tell me what to feel

I've always been like nah, I'm going to have it my way, that way, when I look out that window at the end of the day, I can say I did it my way, whether it's on a higher level, or a level where I can just maintain, I can still say I did it my way.

It was scary. But it was so liberating. I thought, This is not predetermined - I get to choose. There are some days where I have to choose five times in a day. I had to make a choice when you called and the phone rang, whether I'm going to show up and be me, or whether I'm going to say what I think I'm supposed to say and get off the phone.

The trouble is if you don’t spend your life yourself, other people spend it for you.

We can each immediately liberate ourselves as victims in the world, through solidifying an intent to act.

Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may

It is not in virtue of its liberty that the human will attains to grace, it is much rather by grace that it attains to liberty.

Everything you do is based on the choices you make. It's not your parents, your past relationships, your job, the economy, the weather, an argument or your age that is to blame. You and only you are responsible for every decision and choice you make. Period.

He saw a lawyer killing a viper on a dunghill hard by his own stable; And the Devil smiled, for it put him in mind of Cain and his brother Abel.

I believe that - love is a choice. I believe that we love, that if I'm forced to love you then I don't know that I've really loved you.

Evil was seductive and easy, and virtue was difficult and unappreciated.

No man must encroach upon my province, nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without pertinaciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve; but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others; but that exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service.

I love whom I love," Prince Lir repeated firmly. "You have no power over anything that matters.

Love, if it be love indeed, asks no permission as to where it shall seek vantage ground or gain its victory - it is of all powers the most unfettered and the one which takes the widest course of largest liberty.

A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.

I am, as I have always been, of the opinion that while the niceties of normal moral constraints should be our guides, they must not be our masters.

Shall I pass by and leave you lying there because of the expedition you led against Greece, or shall I set you up again because of your magnanimity and your virtues in other respects?

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

You can't let anybody else tell you what your choices are. Sometimes they won't give you the right choice.

If you knew your potential to feel good, you would ask no one to be different so that you can feel good. You would free yourself of all of that cumbersome impossibility of needing to control the world, or control your mate, or control your child. You are the only one who creates your reality. For no one else can think for you, no one else can do it. It is only you, every bit of it you.

When a man declares: "There are no blacks and whites [in morality]" he is making a psychological confession, and what he means is: "I am unwilling to be wholly good - and please don't regard me as wholly evil!"