Moral Transformation Quotes

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...

I believe that each person is more than the worst thing they've ever done.

There are people in the world who have the power to change our values.

Redemption basically is about holistic health, if you want to translate it into modern parlance. What I suggest - based on the Christian tradition but not often preached - is that you can't enter into the fullness of the Pascal mystery of the redemption unless there is a radical transformation of motivation within you.

I'm not a universalist, and the way I talk about final loss is this: People worship idols - money, whatever. Their humanness gets reshaped around the idol - you become like what you worship. That's one of the basic spiritual laws.

It is never too late to turn from the errors of our ways: He who repents of his sins is almost innocent.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

He who repents of having sinned is almost innocent.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

I did not use paint, I made myself up morally.

We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?

After faith comes repentance, or, rather, repentance is faith's twin brother and is born at the same time.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.

When you are converted, you want to do what you didn't want to do before, and you don't want to do what you wanted to do before. There's a change in the heart; there's a cleaning up, a change in orientation, and holiness becomes attractive, instead of something you have to put up with to figure out what you can get away with. As long as young people are asking, 'Can I get away with this?' or 'Can I get away with that?' I wonder if they're regenerate. If they're asking, instead, 'How can I grow in holiness?' then I suspect they've begun to understand.

Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss

Contemporary literature in the West has shown some signs of ethical change.

Is it possible, I wonder, for a man to truly change? Or do character and habit form the immovable boundaries of our lives?

A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the fact, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God.

Therefore let us repent and pass from ignorance to knowledge, from foolishness to wisdom, from licentiousness to self-control, from injustice to righteousness, from godlessness to God.

If you desire to be good, begin by believing that you are wicked.

To be born again is, as it were, to enter upon a new existence, to have a new mind, a new heart, new views, new principles, new tastes, new affections, new likings, new dislikings, new fears, new joys, new sorrows, new love to things once hated, new hatred to things once loved, new thoughts of God, and ourselves, and the world, and the life to come, and salvation.

True redemption is...when guilt leads to good.

We shall do well ever to remember, that Christianity is not a mere speculative theory, that is to inform the mind; but a great practical lesson, to renew the heart, and to bring us back to the state from whence we are fallen.