Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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

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

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Moral choices do not depend on personal preference and private decision but on right reason and, I would add, divine order.

Hume, Basil

16.

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

17.

France, Anatole

18.

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

Greene, Graham

19.

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

Shuman, Rick

20.

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

21.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

22.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

23.

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

24.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

25.

Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.

John Ruskin

26.

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

Kraus, Karl

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

32.

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

Sallust

33.

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

Feoude

34.

To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.

Locke, John

35.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

36.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

37.

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

38.

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

Dane, Frank

39.

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

40.

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

Kant, Immanuel

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

46.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

47.

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

48.

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

Mencken, H. L.

49.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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

Lippmann, Walter