#oral

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn't turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents--were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was about: Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#fiction #god #life #literature #love

[At the scene of a murder] The cats' bloodthirst was normal; it was the way God had made them. They were hunters, they killed for food and to train their young--well maybe sometimes for sport. But this violent act by some unknown human had nothing to do with hunting--for a human to brutally maim one of the own kind out of rage or sadism or greed was, to Joe and Dulcie (the cats), a shocking degradation of the human condition. To imagine that vicious abandon in a human deeply distressed Dulcie; she did not like thinking about humans that way. ↗

— Shirley Rousseau Murphy

#ethics #human-condition #morals #murder #food

Your conscience is the measure of the honesty of your selfishness. Listen to it carefully. ↗

— Richard Bach

#encouragement #inspiration #life #morality #selfishness

If we are to survive, we must have ideas, vision, and courage. These things are rarely produced by committees. Everything that matters in our intellectual and moral life begins with an individual confronting his own mind and conscience in a room by himself. ↗

— Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

#committees #confronting #conscience #courage #everything

We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence. ↗

— Gary L. Francione

#birds #fish #humans #intelligence #morally-valuable

Some people's blameless lives are to blame for a good deal. ↗

— Dorothy L. Sayers

#conduct-of-life #double-standards #hypocrisy #morality #social-norms

Families start out, most of the time, with unconditional acceptance of one another. That acceptance starts in childhood and continues into adulthood. Somewhere in there, between childhood and adulthood, the ability to distinguish right versus wrong is born. ↗

— Bart Hopkins

#family #life #literature #morality #texas

Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness? ↗

— Alain de Botton

#life #madness #morality #world #life

Don’t say bad words; don’t interrupt people; don’t shove; don’t steal; don’t lie. To the child, all these prohibitions appear identical (“It’s not nice”). The distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic will come only later, and gradually. Politeness thus precedes morality, or rather, morality at first is nothing more than politeness: a compliance with usage and its established rules, with the normative play of appearances—a compliance with the world and the ways of the world. ↗

— André Comte-Sponville

#life

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. ↗

— Ursula K. Le Guin

#ethics #good-and-evil #life #morals #war