Quotes about Integrity

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.

I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence

There are ultimately only two possible adjustments to life; one is to suit our lives to principles; the other is to suit principles to our lives. If we do not live as we think, we soon begin to think as we live. The method of adjusting moral principles to the way men live is just a perversion of the order of things.

Moral principles do not depend on a majority vote. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong. Right is right, even if nobody is right.

Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.

When the will loves anything that is below it in dignity, it degrades itself.

What is discovered may be abused, but that does not mean the discovery was evil.

Virginity among pagans meant a bodily condition, a physical intactness, a preserved isolation, to which there was nothing corresponding in the man. Hence pagans never glorified the virgin man, but only the virgin maid. But with Christianity, virginity ceased to mean physical intactness but unity. It meant not separation but relationship, not the will of another person alone, but also the will of God.

We hate others, and call it "zeal"; we flatter others because of what they can do for us, and call it "love"; we lie to them, and call it "tact.

Truth does grow, but it grows homogeneously, like an acorn into an oak; it does not swing in the breeze, like a weathercock. The leopard does not change his spots nor the Ethiopian his skin, though the leopard be put in bars or the Ethiopian in pink tights. The nature of certain things is fixed, and none more so than the nature of truth. Truth may be contradicted a thousand times, but that only proves that it is strong enough to survive a thousand assaults.

To love what we say, it must be true. To want to speak the truth, it must be loved.

We lose our souls not only by the evil we do but also by the good we leave undone.