Motivational Quotes

Morality

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

- A. J. Ayer

Best Quotes about Morality

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Huxley, Aldous

A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

There are few things more disturbing than to find, in somebody we detest, a moral quality which seems to us demonstrably superior to anything we ourselves possess. It augurs not merely an unfairness on the part of creation, but a lack of artistic judgment. Sainthood is acceptable only in saints.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.

Wilde, Oscar

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

Lowell, James Russell

I cannot believe that this country cannot come together around some values what these kids need is a moral life... the issue is not ideas, it is conduct. The real question is how we reach these young people morally, and what do we bring to them.

Coles, Robert

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

Selden, John

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

Kraus, Karl

10.

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

Anouilh, Jean

11.

The great rule of moral conduct is next to God, respect time.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

12.

In Los Angeles, it's like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they're morally right. That's when you want to choke people, you know?

Neeson, Liam

13.

Unfortunately, moral beauty in art -- like physical beauty in a person -- is extremely perishable. It is nowhere so durable as artistic or intellectual beauty. Moral beauty has a tendency to decay very rapidly into sententiousness or untimeliness.

Sontag, Susan

14.

Mercy to living beings, self restraint, truth, honesty, chastity and contentment, right faith and knowledge, and austerity are but the entourage of morality.

Sila-Prabhrita

15.

The fatal trait of the times is the divorce between religion and morality.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Moral power is probably best when it is not used. The less you use it the more you have.

Young, Andrew

17.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Thoreau, Henry David

18.

There's always the hyena of morality at the garden gate, and the real wolf at the end of the street.

Lawrence, D. H.

19.

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.

Henri-FrÚdÚric Amiel

20.

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

Just as there's garbage that pollutes the Potomac river, there is garbage polluting our culture. We need an Environmental Protection Agency to clean it up.

Buchanan, Patrick

23.

It is almost systematically to constitute a natural moral law. Nature has no principles. She furnishes us with no reason to believe that human life is to be respected. Nature, in her indifference, makes no difference between right and wrong.

France, Anatole

24.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

25.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

26.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Carlyle, Thomas

27.

The quality of moral behavior varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

Huxley, Aldous

28.

When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.

Didion, Joan

29.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

A woman can look both moral and exciting -- if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

Ferber, Edna

31.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

32.

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

James A. Forude

33.

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

Weil, Simone

34.

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.

Lippmann, Walter

35.

Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

36.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Voltaire

37.

We have in fact, two kinds of morality, side by side: one that we preach, but do not practice, and another that we practice, but seldom preach.

Russell, Bertrand

38.

It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.

Goldman, Emma

39.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

40.

The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.

Rand, Ayn

41.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

Hands, Terry

42.

The greater part of humanity is too much harassed and fatigued by the struggle with want, to rally itself for a new and sterner struggle with error.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

43.

Let the public mind become corrupt, and all efforts to secure property, liberty, or life by the force of laws written on paper will be as vain as putting up a sign in an apple orchard to exclude canker worms.

Mann, Horace

44.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

46.

The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.

Bataille, Georges

47.

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.

Denis Diderot

48.

When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.

Lao-Tzu

49.

A set of rules laid out by professionals to show the way they would like to act if it was profitable.

Dane, Frank

50.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Greene, Graham