#ethics

Buddha wrote a code which he said would be useful to guide men in darkness, but he never claimed to be the Light of the world. Buddhism was born with a disgust for the world, when a prince's son deserted his wife and child, turning from the pleasures of existence to the problems of existence. Burnt by the fires of the world, and already weary with it, Buddha turned to ethics. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#buddhism #ethics #morals #life

May we think of freedom not as the right to do as we please but as the opportunity to do what is right. ↗

— Peter Marshall

#freedom #inspirational #morality #united-states-of-america #freedom

I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to. ↗

— Theodore Roosevelt

#politics #men

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#morality #objective-truth #standards #men

What if our better nature wasn't better after all? But was instead, well, just nature? ↗

— Kevin Dutton

#nature

You honor yourself by acting with dignity and composure. ↗

— Allan Lokos

#culture #education #ethics #inspiration #meditation

I suppose therefore that all things I see are illusions; I believe that nothing has ever existed of everything my lying memory tells me. I think I have no senses. I believe that body, shape, extension, motion, location are functions. What is there then that can be taken as true? Perhaps only this one thing, that nothing at all is certain. ↗

— René Descartes

#logic #metaphysics #ontology #philosophy #psychology

It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. ↗

— Erich Fromm

#ethics #humanist-psychology #mental-health #socio-analysis #culture

People who try hard to do the right thing always seem mad. ↗

— Stephen King

#morality #morals

Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I'm bullshitting myself, morally speaking? ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#happyness #morality #morals