INTEGRITY

 

PRITHA’S PERSPECTIVE

“Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not.”
― Oprah Winfrey

In ethics, integrity is regarded by many people as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one’s actions. The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete. In this context, integrity is the inner sense of “wholeness” deriving from qualities such as honesty and consistency of character. In philosophical context, it can be defined as the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness. It is generally a personal choice to uphold oneself to consistent moral and ethical standards.

“A quiet conscience makes one strong!”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

There is no measure to test one’s integrity. Words don’t prove integrity, actions do. It does not matter what you do or how you do or how well you do. What matters is if it was a right thing to do. Sometimes people know about it and sometimes they don’t but that should not be a reason that stops you from doing what is right.

One of the strongest pillars of integrity is the understanding that your values are yours alone, and the insistence of them for others is self-righteousness. Self-righteousness is not a very noble or attractive quality .Therefore, if you find yourself sitting in judgment, this means that you still have work to do on yourself – and that you should turn your gaze inward, not outward because different characteristics allow people to achieve different objectives in different circumstances. Learning and accepting diversity and differences is better than insisting that your way of life is superior which indirectly implies that you might be questioning someone else’s integrity.

“I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
― Frederick Douglass