Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

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

Sallust

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

Ferber, Edna

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

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

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

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

10.

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

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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.

13.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

14.

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

George Bernard Shaw

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

18.

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

19.

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

20.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

21.

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

Kraus, Karl

22.

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

Froude, James A.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Didion, Joan

29.

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

30.

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

Mencken, H. L.

31.

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

32.

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

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

34.

Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Warshow, Robert

35.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

36.

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

Shawcross, Lord

37.

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

Shuman, Rick

38.

A man can do what he ought to do; and when he says he cannot, it is because he will not.

Feoude

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

41.

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

Anouilh, Jean

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Rand, Ayn

45.

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

Young, Andrew

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

48.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

49.

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

50.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane