Motivational Quotes

Morality

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

- A. J. Ayer

Best Quotes about Morality

Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

Every man, in his own opinion, forms an exception to the ordinary rules of morality.

Hazlitt, William

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

I never come back home with the same moral character I went out with; something or other becomes unsettled where I had achieved internal peace; some one or other of the things I had put to flight reappears on the scene.

Seneca

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

Bertrand Russell

10.

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

11.

Scandal is great entertainment because it allows people to feel contempt, a moral emotion that gives feeling of moral superiority while asking nothing in return.

Jonathan Haidt

12.

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

13.

The soul is the captain and ruler of the life of morals.

Sallust

14.

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

Lippmann, Walter

15.

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

Denis Diderot

16.

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

Kraus, Karl

17.

While moral rules may be propounded by authority the fact that these were so propounded would not validate them.

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

18.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

19.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

20.

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

21.

Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

Kant, Immanuel

22.

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

23.

Many people convince themselves if it is economically necessary, it's morally right. That's not always the case.

24.

Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

No author can be as moral as his work and no preacher as pious as his sermons.

Paul, Jean

26.

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

Henry David Thoreau

27.

The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.

Froude, James A.

28.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

29.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

30.

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

31.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Diderot, Denis

32.

The biggest threat to our well-being is the absence of moral clarity and purpose.

Shuman, Rick

33.

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

34.

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

Wilde, Oscar

35.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

36.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

37.

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

38.

Moral indignation in most cases is, 2% moral, 48% indignation, and 50% envy.

Sica, Vittorio De

39.

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

40.

A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true.

Socrates

41.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

42.

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

43.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

44.

The new so called morality has too often the old immorality condoned.

Shawcross, Lord

45.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

46.

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

47.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

48.

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

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

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