These ethos quotes will inspire you. Ethos “custom” or “character” of the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging ethos quotes, ethos sayings, and ethos proverbs.
Best Ethos Quotes
- “Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?” ~ Joseph Campbell
- “With impressive proof on all sides of magnificent progress, no one can rightly deny the fundamental correctness of our economic system.” ~ Herbert Hoover
- “Sometimes you have to look reality in the eye, and deny it.” ~ Garrison Keillor
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“Fear stimulates us to take action and can be our friend, but if you act as though fear is not there-if you deny it-it will build and create barriers.” ~ Darren Johnson
- “It’s actually quite a good ethos for life: go into the unknown with truth, commitment, and openness and mostly you’ll be okay.” ~ Alan Cumming
- “Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.” ~ Randal Marlin
- “The more we deny that we have a dark side, the more power it has over us.” ~ Sheryl Lee
- “The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.” ~ Edward Hopper
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“No one can deny the excitement of visiting another world.” ~ Bernard M. Oliver
- “On the whole, I am on the side of the unregenerate who affirms the worth of life as an end in itself, as against the saints who deny it.” ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
- “A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together.” ~ Anne Waldman
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“What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.” ~ Herbert Read
- “Hold firmly that our faith is identical with that of the ancients. Deny this, and you dissolve the unity of the Church.” ~ Thomas Aquinas
- “As you age naturally, your family shows more and more on your face. If you deny that, you deny your heritage.” ~ Frances Conroy
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“I like to call the ethos I grew up with ‘Oklahoma values.’ But you’d be just as accurate if you said ‘American values.’ Except for our lack of a seacoast, Oklahoma has a little bit of just about everything that’s American.” ~ J. C. Watts
- “I came up around people who took acting seriously, who cared about acting, cared about the theater and, in the ’70s, made movies that said something that mattered. I came up with those people, and I was a kid. Their ethos and credo became mine.” ~ Laurence Fishburne
- “‘Untitled’ is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.” ~ Jerry Saltz
- “The satiric ethos of Mad was a much bigger childhood influence.” ~ Alison Bechdel
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“I think my speeches are hilarious. I think I’m a natural comedian, but I like denying people the chance to laugh. I want to deny you the relief of the punchline.” ~ Lydia Lunch
- “The dangers which threaten us are twofold: First, from the Confederate forces, composed of men whose earnest convictions and reckless bravery it is idle to deny.” ~ Robert Dale Owen
- “WOMEN must be at the forefront of nation-building to bring the South African citizenry together and, therefore, develop a whole new ethos of human co-existence” ~ Steven Biko
- “So, economics should emulate physics’ basic ethos, but its search for precision in physics-like formulas is almost always wrong in economics.” ~ Charlie Munger
- “In the ’70s and ’80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science.” ~ John Maeda
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“Those who deny the existence of a supreme being have been turned into second-class citizens by a government that continuously sends messages that ‘real Americans’ believe in God.” ~ Michael Newdow
- “If you notice any of the press from when I was with the show, I would always deny it being the year 3000.” ~ Joel Hodgson
- “I think he likes it. He fits in with our ethos. He’s a good worker and is an excellent pro. Thank goodness he likes his training or else he wouldn’t settle here.” ~ Iain Dowie
- “A spiritual sensibility encourages us to see ourselves as part of the fundamental unity of all being. If the thrust of the market ethos has been to foster a competitive individualism, a major thrust of many traditional religious and spiritual sensibilities has been to help us see our connection with all other human beings.” ~ Michael Lerner
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“Reading more than life teaches us to recognize ethos and pathos.” ~ Mason Cooley
- “A universal ethos cannot be thought the property of any one culture.” ~ Prince Hassan bin Talal
- “The most important thing for me was to never, ever, ever deny it. But I didn’t really have the courage to talk about it. I was thinking, The people who need to know I’m gay know.” ~ Portia de Rossi
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“But I deny that the Constitution recognizes property in man.” ~ William H. Seward
- “No ethos, pursued without thought or mercy, is ethical.” ~ Janet Morris
- “What it really is and what I now have experienced is that, people who take enormous pride in what they’re doing – not in their person – that their work ethos is as high as nowhere else.That they love their jobs, they love to do their jobs properly as best they can. And coupled with the financial umph, you know, you get decent results.” ~ Christoph Waltz
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“This was the ethos of the intelligence analysis directorate during most of the 27 years I spent there.” ~ Ray McGovern
- “The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, … It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.” ~ Adrian Mitchell
- “This is the first generation to grow up on Thatcher – it’s a different ethos. It’s money minded, and it’s the cult of yourself. Now that’s fine, except when it falls down, and you can’t achieve your goals – through high unemployment, through the fact that you probably need inherited money to get anywhere.” ~ Jane Campion
- “To begin with, the key principle of American indie rock wasn’t a circumscribed musical style; it was the punk ethos of DIY, or do-it-yourself. The equation was simple: If punk was rebellious and DIY was rebellious, then doing it yourself was punk. ‘Punk was about more than just starting a band,’ former Minutemen bassist Mike Watt once said, ‘it was about starting a label, it was about touring, it was about taking control. It was like songwriting; you just do it. You want a record, you pay the pressing plant. That’s what it was all about.'” ~ Michael Azerrad
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“I think once you get it in your head, that you’re not going to do anything bigger, you just do things that you enjoy, which has always been my ethos anyway.” ~ Billy Boyd
- “I bring my classical training – some of it, but not all of it – and also my background and culture, to spirituals. And I try to leave room for that unpredictable factor, where the feeling of the song is allowed to come through. The same ethos can be applied to singing Mozart, or Schubert, or Bach. It’s not just about what’s on the page.” ~ Kathleen Battle
- “What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging … in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, ‘Laramie’ often brings to mind ‘Our Town,’ the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire.” ~ Ben Brantley
- “Science has been effective at furthering our understanding of nature because the scientific ethos is based on three key principles: (1) follow the evidence wherever it leads; (2) if one has a theory, one needs to be willing to try to prove it wrong as much as one tries to prove that it is right; (3) the ultimate arbiter of truth is experiment, not the comfort one derives from one’s a priori beliefs, nor the beauty or elegance one ascribes to one’s theoretical models.” ~ Lawrence M. Krauss
- “Science is very vibrant. There are always new observations to be found. And it’s all in the interest in challenging the authority that came before you. That’s consistent with the punk rock ethos that suggests that you should not take what people say at face value.” ~ Greg Graffin
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“I got into New College, Oxford. The ethos was that you could work – or not.” ~ Nigel Rees
- “Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe – a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.” ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky
- “Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.” ~ Susan Jacoby
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“It’s incredible to be working with Mr. Armani and his team at Emporio Armani. I feel an affinity to the brand ethos and have been a long time admirer of their designs.” ~ Calvin Harris
- “Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else’s terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues and in terms of the problems of history making.” ~ C. Wright Mills
- “I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There’s very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That’s not true in other countries so much.” ~ Philip Yancey
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“Science itself is a humanist in the sense that it doesn’t discriminate between human beings, but it is also morally neutral. It is no better or worse than the ethos with and for which it is used.” ~ Max Lerner
- “What becomes fascinating is the way the culture industry doesn’t deny it and doesn’t try to mitigate it, but tries to sell its products as a way of liberating oneself.” ~ Thomas Frank
- “Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.” ~ Wislawa Szymborska
- “And a sensible work strategy might be: surrender to the task but not to the taskmaster, become absorbed in the work itself but never absorb the work ethos.” ~ Michael Foley
- “In Aristotelian terms, the good leader must have ethos, pathos and logos. The ethos is his moral character, the source of his ability to persuade. The pathos is his ability to touch feelings to move people emotionally. The logos is his ability to give solid reasons for an action, to move people intellectually.” ~ Mortimer Adler
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“No man who knows aught can be so stupid to deny that all men naturally were born free.” ~ John Milton
- “The Spirit of Cities presents a new approach to the study of cities in which the focus is placed on a city’s defining ethos or values. The style of the book is attractively conversational and even autobiographical, and far from current social science positivism. For a lover of cities–and perhaps even for one who is not–The Spirit of Cities is consistently good reading.” ~ Nathan Glazer
- “It is reality that awakens possibilities, and nothing would be more perverse than to deny it.” ~ Robert Musil
- “No civilization, not even that of ancient Greece, has ever undergone such a continuous and profound process of change as Western Europe has done during the last 900 years. It is impossible to explain this fact in purely economic terms by a materialistic interpretation of history. The principle of change has been a spiritual one and the progress of Western civilization is intimately related to the dynamic ethos of Western Christianity, which has gradually made Western man conscious of his moral responsibility and his duty to change the world.” ~ Christopher Dawson
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“When the responses elicited by the Epic of Evolution are gathered together several religious principles emerge that I can believe, serve as a framework for a global Ethos.” ~ Ursula Goodenough
- “While cities are distinguished by their architecture and physical appearance, Bell and de-Shalit make a compelling case that many major world cities–and their inhabitants–also express their own distinctive ethos or values. The Spirit of Cities takes the reader on a wide-ranging and lively personal journey.” ~ Witold Rybczynski
- “I’m curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it’s still a very lively ethos. It’s a kind of practice. It’s an ethos that is very sustaining.” ~ Anne Waldman
- “I never deny. I never contradict. I sometimes forget.” ~ Benjamin Disraeli
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“We don’t necessarily stand by our faults every time, but we will always stand by our methodologies and ethos.” ~ Adam Savage
- “I come from a land where the idea of the whole world being one family is rooted in our ethos ‘vasudhaiva kutumbakam’.” ~ Narendra Modi
- “I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women.” ~ Daniel Defoe
- “One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line.” ~ William J. Clinton
