#morality

If humanism were right in declaring that man is born to be happy, he would not be born to die. Since his body is doomed to die, his task on earth evidently must be of a more spiritual nature. It cannot unrestrained enjoyment of everyday life. It cannot be the search for the best ways to obtain material goods and then cheerfully get the most out of them. It has to be the fulfillment of a permanent, earnest duty so that one's life journey may become an experience of moral growth, so that one may leave life a better human being than one started it. ↗

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#humanism #moral-growth #morality #experience

Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking. ↗

— Derek Jarman

#decision #law #lovemaking #morality #our

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#domesticating #human-nature #humanity #morality #nature

If you're smart or rich or lucky Maybe you'll beat the laws of man But the inner laws of spirit And the outer laws of nature No man can ↗

— Joni Mitchell

#nature #objective-morality #nature

If the metaphors in everyday speech are a clue, then all of us associate blankness with virtue rather than with nothingness. Think of the moral connotations of the adjectives: clean, fair, immaculate, lily-white, pure, spotless, unmarred and unsullied. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#nature

Evolution has no moral direction. An evolutionary understanding of human nature can explain the differing intuitions we have when we are faced with an individual rather than with a mass of people, or with people close to us rather than with those far away, but it does not justify those feelings. ↗

— Peter Singer

#evolution #evolutionary-psychology #morality #nature

The state is concerned with the promotion of outward righteousness arising from the individual being constrained to keep the law. The Gospel alters human nature, whereas the state merely restrains human greed and evil, having no positive power to alter human motivation. ↗

— Alister E. McGrath

#grace-and-law #morality #motivational

Immorality is the word we use to describe people that are not sinning the same way we are. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#church #hypocrisy #hypocrites #immorality #judgement

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. ↗

— Simone Weil

#evil #good #morality #reality #romantic

Regarding the need to pray, the anarch is again no different from anyone else. But he does not like to attach himself. He does not squander his best energies. He accepts no substitute for his gold. He knows his freedom, and also what it is worth its weight in. The equation balances when he is offered something credible. The result is ONE. There can be no doubt that gods have appeared, not only in ancient times but even late in history; they feasted with us and fought at our sides. But what good is the splendor of bygone banquets to a starving man? What good is the clinking of gold that a poor man hears through the wall of time? The gods must be called. The anarch lets all this be; he can bide his time. He has his ethos, but not morals. He recognizes lawfulness, but not the law; he despises rules. Whenever ethos goes into shalts and shalt-nots, it is already corrupted. Still, it can harmonize with them, depending on location and circumstances, briefly or at length, just as I harmonize here with the tyrant for as long as I like. One error of the anarchists is their belief that human nature is intrinsically good. They thereby castrate society, just as the theologians ("God is goodness") castrate the Good Lord. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchism #ethos #freedom #gold #human-nature