Justification Quotes

Unable to penetrate to the secret place of his soul where his motives lay hidden, he believed that a supernatural voice had called him onward, and that a supernatural power had obstructed his retreat.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

The worst denial of all is being in denial that we’re in denial in the first place. And I would wonder if that’s not exactly where most of us live out most of our lives.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The main factors that sponsor the abuse of time include procrastination and excuses. Procrastination makes you to shift a task that you can do now into the unseen future, excuses are the reasons why you shift that task.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

My first mistake is to humanize God. My second mistake is to hold those wretched human characteristics up against all of the majestic things that I sense God should be. The blatant discrepancy which is certain to ensue then allows me to not only justify my rejection of Him, it grants me unbridled permission to discount His existence altogether. And that third and final mistake is without a doubt the most costly of all.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path. People have little respect for rules; we respect the moral principles that underlie most rules. But when a moral mission and legal rules are incompatible, we usually care more about the mission.

~ Jonathan Haidt

The immoral woman in Luke 7 has the faith to anticipate Christ's forgiveness. She can act in love with no words to justify.

~ Jenn Thoman

We can hide a lot of stuff until God shows up, for when God shows up nothing is hidden, which includes both our embarrassment and His forgiveness.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If you punish them, they are your slaves and if you forgive them they are your brothers.

~ Auliq Ice

The ones with no imagination are always the quickest to justify themselves

~ Haruki Murakami

It's said that people who give excuses for the reason not do something always formulate those excuses, waiting for the reason to surface to justify their excuses!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

Predestination therefore, as it regards the thing itself, is the Decree of the good pleasure of God in Christ, by which He resolved within Himself from all eternity, to justify, adopt, and endow with everlasting life, to the praise of His own glorious grace, believers on whom He had decreed to bestow faith.

~ James Arminius

True freedom is the gift of the Spirit, the result of grace: but, precisely because it is freedom FOR as well as freedom FROM, it isn't simply a matter of being forced now to be good, against our wills and without our cooperation, but a matter of being released from slavery precisely into responsibility, into being able at last to choose, to exercise moral muscle, knowing both that one is doing it oneself and that the Spirit is at work within, that God himself is doing that which I too am doing.

~ N.t. Wright

Like crying wolf, if you keep looking for sympathy as a justification for your actions, you will someday be left standing alone when you really need help.

~ Criss Jami

There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more.

~ Israelmore Ayivor

To use the past to justify the present is bad enough—but it’s just as bad to use the present to justify the past.

~ Amitav Ghosh

I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.

~ Charles Lamb

The reason placing blame repeatedly fails to work is that I repeatedly place it on everyone else instead of where it actually belongs.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ.

~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Sin is the transgression of the law, the death of Christ is the satisfaction of the law, justification is the verdict of the law, and sanctification is the believer's fulfillment of the law.

~ Ernest F. Kevan

Before there could be any permanent reformation the people must be led to feel their utter inability in themselves to render obedience to God.

~ Ellen G. White

The Spirit of God draws or leads the sinner from one phase to another, gradually, in proportion as one is found having a disposition to responsive hearing. Grace flows ordinarily from prevenient grace through the grace of baptism through the grace of justification toward sanctifying grace leading toward consummation in glory. The power by which one cooperates with grace is grace itself. In this way God draws all to himself, eliciting a hunger for righteousness and a desire for truth.

~ Thomas C. Oden

Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the truth, it would be too late.

~ Paulo Coelho

Do not justify art, once you do, it limits the feelings it is apt to inflict. Art with Boundaries shadows all its principles.

~ Unarine Ramaru

Has it not ‘dawned’ on us that many of the things that we incessantly blame others for are actually things that our actions originally set in motion? Or, are we too weak to experience a ‘dawning’ of that sort?

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Oh yes, I am frequently driven to an enraged frenzy by the blatantly crass actions of others. But to be painfully honest, that anger is much less driven by the reality of their actions and far more fueled by the realization that everything I am is everything that I hate in them.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Show the world the man you think you are, and I will show the world the man you really are...

~ Timothy Norr

A God out there and values out there, if they existed, would be utterly useless and unintelligible to us. There is nothing to be gained by nostalgia for the old objectivism, which was in any case used only to justify arrogance, tyranny, and cruelty. People [forget] ... how utterly hateful the old pre-humanitarianism world was.

~ Don Cupitt

If all meaning were relative, then the meanings of the terms in the proposition All meaning is relative would be relative. Therefore the proposition All meaning is relative destroys itself. It is nothing but an evasion of reality. That seems a high price to pay, even for the privilege of killing people.

~ J. Budziszewski

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

~ Ludwig Feuerbach

I can explain why I have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What's bad is bad even if necessary.

~ Dean Koontz

It is through justification of one's actions that a completely guiltless life is possible.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

To recklessly excuse a failure is to believe that I’ve effectively erased it from the story of my life, when I’ve actually imprinted it in indelible ink.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.

~ Barry Eisler

People with low self-confidence and self-esteem often feel nervous about antagonizing others and tend to rate others’ needs more highly than their own.

~ Auliq Ice

[P]erhaps you notice how the denial is so often the preface to the justification.

~ Christopher Hitchens

All feel justified. To find truth, a man must consider the possibility that he is wrong.

~ Lance Conrad

A hundred words put together to formulate an excuse will never resolve a conflict, political justifications are silly lies.

~ Auliq Ice

Every transgression and disobedience receives a just recompense of reward, except with those who truly love themselves.

~ Auliq Ice

One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict “unnecessary” suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our “moral schizophrenia” when it comes to nonhumans.A follow-up question that I often get is: “What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?”Vivisection, Part One: The “Necessity” of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach

~ Gary L. Francione

He turned to her - his gesture a superb compound of relief, remorse, passionate candour and bewilderment touched with curiosity; confidence and perfect penitence. Against which Scylla had to brace herself. Against such bravura how dull truth seemed, and difficult to access. Never had the bottom of a well seemed less attractive. She must hear him first. She could go down later.

~ Mary Butts