Your ability to rationalize your own bad deeds makes you believe that the whole world is as amoral as you are.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Very bad things follow when we kid ourselves that we're naturally rational, rather than the more humbling truth: naturally emotional.
It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.
One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart.
I believe there's things all around us that make you do good things and some that make you do bad things.
Circumstances dictate your set of values, your set of morals.
If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.
Time, which wears down and diminishes all things, augments and increases good deeds, because a good turn liberally offered to a reasonable man grows continually through noble thought and memory.
Selfishness is one of the more common faces of pride. 'How everything affects me' is the center of all that matters - self-conceit, self-pity, worldly self-fulfillment, self-gratification, and self-seeking.
I think my heart is quite selfish. If I followed my heart, I would not be a good person. But I have moral principles. I have to sit down and reflect.
My deepest impulses are optimistic, an attitude that seems to me as spiritually necessary and proper as it is intellectually suspect.
No opposing quotes found.