You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.

Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

Eternal truth eternal righteousness eternal love these only can triumph for these only can endure.

The truth is the secular world isn't too enamored with Jesus. And they're not too enamored with someone who is leading people to Jesus. So if you're out there talking about people's sins and you're talking about righteousness you will get pushback. Jesus Himself did. The apostles did. I mean there's persecution all up and down the line.

Honesty is the cruelest game of all because not only can you hurt someone - and hurt them to the bone - you can feel self-righteous about it at the same time.

If we had any nerve at all if we had any real balls as a society or whatever you need whatever quality you need real character we would make an effort to really address the wrongs in this society righteously.

Religion is a strange wonderful thing. More crimes have been committed in the name of righteousness than any other notion.

I wish your increase in holiness number love religion and righteousness and wait you and cease to contend with these men that are gone from us for there is nothing that shall convince them but judgment.

Who's to say that there is any more support for Freud's psychoanalytic concept of the superego than there is for that old time religion that asserted that there is a God who ordains what is right and wrong and that His righteousness endures for all generations?

True religion is real living living with all one's soul with all one's goodness and righteousness.

There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.

All men's souls are immortal but the souls of the righteous are immortal and divine.

My dear sister I hope when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning.

The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.

The hardest people to reach with the love of God are not the bad people. They know they are bad. They have no defense. The hardest ones to win for God are the self-righteous people.

My future is righteousness.

I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

Bad religion is arrogant self-righteous dogmatic and intolerant. And so is bad science. But unlike religious fundamentalists scientific fundamentalists do not realize that their opinions are based on faith. They think they know the truth.

No person I have ever met not even the most righteous or pure of heart has gone without those times when faith recedes in the busy-ness of life.

My heart hath often been deeply afflicted under a feeling that the standard of pure righteousness is not lifted up to the people by us as a society in that clearness which it might have been had we been as faithful as we ought to be to the teachings of Christ.

A man's sentiments are generally just and right while it is second selfish thought which makes him trim and adopt some other view. The best reforms are worked out when sentiment operates as it does in women with the indignation of righteousness.

My dear brothers take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen slow to speak and slow to become angry for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires.