Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

Morality without religion is only a kind of dead reckoning -- an endeavor to find our place on a cloudy sea by measuring the distance we have run, but without any observation of the heavenly bodies.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

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

Anouilh, Jean

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

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

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

Froude, James A.

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

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

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Huxley, Aldous

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Lowell, James Russell

16.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

17.

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

Hazlitt, William

18.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it , they are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson

19.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

Bevan, Aneurin

20.

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

21.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

22.

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

Kraus, Karl

23.

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

24.

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

25.

Morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. Judicial decrees may not change the heart, but they can restrain the heartless.

King Jr. Martin Luther

26.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

27.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

28.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

29.

The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.

Sharpe, Cecil J.

30.

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

Denis Diderot

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

33.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

34.

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

Kant, Immanuel

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Greene, Graham

38.

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

39.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

40.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

41.

I say that a man must be certain of his morality for the simple reason that he has to suffer for it.

G. K. Chesterton

42.

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

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.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Hands, Terry

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.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

49.

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

50.

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