ethical restraint Quotes

What is the relationship between spirituality and ethical practice? Since love and compassion and similar qualities all, by definition, presume some level of concern for others' well-being, they presume ethical restraint. We cannot be loving and compassionate unless at the same time we curb our own harmful impulses and desires.

All constraint, / Except what wisdom lays on evil men, / Is evil.

Even if we Moslems believe that we have been the victims of crimes, we should not commit crimes in retaliation. It makes a mockery of our ethical and moral system.

Oh, I have feelings for him, all right. I'd like to put him in the ground myself, believe me. Still, it would be wrong. Promise me." "Fine. I promise I won't kill him." He said it too easily. My eyes narrowed. "Promise me right here and now that you will also never cripple, maim, dismember, blind, torture, bleed, or otherwise inflict any injury to Danny Milton. Or otherwise stand by while someone else does as you watch." "Blimey, that's not fair!" he protested

I don't kill people. Perhaps it's just another inhibition to do away with it. Perhaps not. There's really no way of telling. It's possible I've just never been able to well up enough interest in any person to care long enough to end their life. I'd much rather avoid them altogether. Most of them. It's 4 A.M. and the sky is beautiful up and away from this room and this bed and the oppressive inevitability of sleep. I HATE SLEEP. But sleep always comes (that, or madness).

In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men.

I never killed anyone because it wasn't necessary. I could have killed.

Virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.

[He] alone is truly nonviolent who remains nonviolent even though he has the ability to strike.

Only reverence can restrain violence - reverence for human life and the environment.

I am not prepared to explain to a sick child with cystic fibrosis, facing death and fighting for breath, the ethical grounds that hinder the science which could save him.

The passions are the gales of life; and it is religion only that can prevent them from rising into a tempest.

There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.

For Christians above all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force...it is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.

Nothing can be said: nothing sure, nothing probable, nothing honest. Better to err through omission than through commission: better to refrain from steering the fate of others, since it is already so difficult to navigate one's own.

The curiosity of an honorable mind willingly rests there, where the love of truth does not urge it farther onward, and the love of its neighbor bids it stop; in other words, it willingly stops at the point where the interests of truth do not beckon it onward, and charity cries, Halt!

A good man not only forbears those gratifications which are forbidden by reason and religion, but even restrains himself in unforbidden instances.

The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

Scientific progress makes moral progress a necessity; for if man's power is increased, the checks that restrain him from abusing it must be strengthened.

There are men who would do anything, asleep, and I'm not sure what stops them when they wake. I do not know how they draw the line.

You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.

Higher than the perfect song For which love longeth, Is the tender fear of wrong, That never wrongeth.