ethical aspirations Quotes

If mankind had wished for what is right, they might have had it long ago.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

As long as there are human beings, there will be the idea of brotherhood -- and an almost total inability to practice it.

The good God would not inspire unattainable desires.

I think most people are decent people. I don't know if they could stand the pressure he's under, but most people aspire to be decent people.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

We need to build millions of little moments of caring on an individual level. Indeed, as talk of a politics of meaning becomes more widespread, many people will feel it easier to publicly acknowledge their own spiritual and ethical aspirations and will allow themselves to give more space to their highest vision in their personal interactions with others. A politics of meaning is as much about these millions of small acts as it is about any larger change. The two necessarily go hand in hand.

We do what we must, and call it by the best names we can, and would fain have the praise of having intended the result which ensues.

Virtue is the desire of things honourable and the power of attaining them.

All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.

To amend mankind, moralists should show them man, not as he is, but as he ought to be.