Moral Struggles Quotes

If you want to play a complex, turmoiled character, then give him a dose of Catholicism.

The accumulation of wealth is a process which is of itself morally neutral. True, as Christianity teaches, riches bring temptations. But then so does poverty.

Like most parents, I think, my children have been the source of some of my most intense joys and despairs, my deepest moral dilemmas and greatest moral achievements.

I think we have to face right in the center of the hurricane, if you will, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s foibles and faults. I think that we do no good to ourselves and do no honor to him by pretending that he did not fail, that he did not wrestle greatly and, at times, surrender to his own sins and his own faults and failures.

It is unavoidable that if we learn more about a great man's life, we shall also hear of occasions on which he has done no better than we, and has in fact come nearer to us as a human being.

Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.

Literature gives us models of living human beings who may not agree with us and even be our enemies. D. H. Lawrence said that the purpose of literature was to expand our sympathies. To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man. And this conflict cannot be easily reconciled. The tension is always there as a kind of a pain in the human condition.

What surprises me about humanity is that in the end such a narrow range of plights defines our moral lives.

The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

You know honestly I think there's a Dracula, a Wolf Man, and a Frankenstein's Monster in all of us. They are sides of our own character so that's why I think we can relate to them in terms of a 'I know how that feels' kind of thing.

When I'm playing a character like Jonathan in Ripley's Game I want to be in the moment when he's feeling pain; this very ordinary person who finds himself in extraordinary circumstances.

... sufficient conscience to bother him, but not sufficient to keep him straight.

I enjoy played flawed men who are pushed to the limit, who make mistakes and then have to recover.

Whenever I have tried to make a character bad, they end up being good in some way.

I think that characters who are nice all the time and who you sympathize with can get really boring.

I'm not interested in a character's goodness. I'm interested in what makes them human.

For me, what is important is to bring the inner life of these characters - their strengths, contradictions, anguish and triumph - alive.

Of course I know my characters are unlikable sometimes or have prejudices. It's not as if I'm thinking they're so endearing all the time. I guess it's much more interesting to me to write someone who is a combination of good and bad qualities because that's what people are like in real life.

The Bible is filled with intriguing stories about complex and flawed human beings who ponder immense moral questions and engage in colossal clashes with evil.