Neale Donald Walsch Quotes

The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

You can't slice up morals.

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

If you're going to figure something out, study ethics. You can ask What's the answer? What's Right and Wrong? What I learned is that nobody knows the answer and there is no Right and Wrong. So I'm incapable of becoming a fundamentalist because there are no absolutes, there's always a what if.

I had taken a course in Ethics. I read a thick textbook, heard the class discussions and came out of it saying I hadn't learned a thing I didn't know before about morals and what is right or wrong in human conduct.

The problem is that no ethical system has ever achieved consensus. Ethical systems are completely unlike mathematics or science. This is a source of concern.

Your character is always right. No real person thinks they're being stupid or misguided or bigoted or evil or just plain wrong - so your characters can't, either.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill will and envy.

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.

How we become moral and understand good and bad, and how we overcome our impulse towards violence, is all really important to me, as a person.

The feeling of right or wrong is the beginning of wisdom.

The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?

Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

It is a prejudice to think that morality is more favourable to the development of reason than immorality.

I'm offended by the is-ought fallacy, which has been used to justify slavery, women not being allowed to vote, children working in factories.

Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

Morality must be the heart of our existence, if it is to be what it wants to be for us. The highest form of philosophy is ethics. Thus all philosophy begins with "I am." The highest statement of cognition must be an expression of that fact which is the means and ground for all cognition, namely, the goal of the I.

We cheated, you and me, and someone noticed. I noticed you; someone else noticed me. It hurts us. That's not so bad. So many people cheat. Everywhere on every level. Everyone's cheated. I'm just saying that you don't need to see yourself as a cheater. Because that's not who you are. You're someone who cheated. There's a difference, and you should try to get that difference, or that's who you'll grow up to be.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.