Quotes about Values

We don't always choose the best solution but we carry on regardless, trying to remain upright and decent in order to do honor not to the walls or the doors or the windows but to the empty space inside, the space where we worship and venerate what is dearest and most important to us.

Avoid those who seek friends in order to maintain a certain social status or to open doors they would not otherwise be able to approach.

Some of my friends are very poor, the only thing they have is money.

All the fame and fortune, glory and prestige, can't make me happy if it goes against what I believe.

Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by just social conventions, like driving on the right-hand versus left-hand side of the road? Or are they merely expressions of personal preference, like having a taste for certain foods? Or are they somehow valid and binding, independent of our opinion, and if they are objective in this way, what is their foundation?

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning.

If you have not chosen the kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.

If [we] have no chosen the kingdom of God [first], it will make in the end no difference what [we] have chosen instead.

Projects undreamed of by past generations will absorb our immediate descendants, comforts, activities, amenities, pleasures will crowd upon them, but their hearts will ache and their lives will be barren, if they have not a vision above material things.

The order of the commandments thus gives some insight into Israel's hierarchy of values. Roughly speaking, the order was God, family, life, sex, property. It is sobering, looking at that order, that in modern society (in its debased Western form at least) we have almost exactly reversed that order of values. Money and sex matter a lot more than human life, the family is scorned in theory and practice, and God is the last thing in most people's thinking, let alone priorities.

Righteousness can never be legislated. It is a matter of the heart.

A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all the other virtues.