Daily Inspiration Quote by Corliss Lamont

Lamont plants ethics where it’s least comfortable: not in lofty ideals or tidy rules, but in the gritty moment of choosing. “The act of willing” is doing a lot of work here. He’s steering ethics away from armchair verdicts and toward agency, the inner lever-pull where a person commits to one path and shuts the door on others. That’s a quietly provocative move in a century obsessed with explaining humans away - by instinct, economics, conditioning, neurology, ideology. Lamont, a humanist with a strong secular bent, is insisting that moral life can’t be reduced to being pushed around by forces you didn’t choose.

The phrasing also carries a subtle rebuke to ethical systems that treat people like passive sites of virtue or vice. If ethics is “central” in choosing, then morality isn’t primarily about having the correct beliefs; it’s about decision-making under pressure, with imperfect knowledge, competing goods, and real consequences. The emphasis on “various courses of conduct” highlights pluralism: life isn’t a multiple-choice test with one obvious right answer. It’s a forked road where each option comes with trade-offs, and the ethical self is revealed in how you navigate them.

Context matters: Lamont wrote in an era shaped by world wars, totalitarian propaganda, and Cold War fatalism. Against that backdrop, centering will reads like a defense of moral responsibility - and a warning. If we surrender the idea that we genuinely choose, we also surrender the grounds for blame, praise, resistance, and courage. Ethics, for Lamont, is not a museum of principles. It’s the lived drama of picking a direction and owning it.