Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Bertrand Russell

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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.

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.

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

Hands, Terry

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

Voltaire

'Wrong'is one of those concepts that depends on witnesses.

Scott Adams

10.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Shawcross, Lord

13.

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

Ferber, Edna

14.

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

Hume, Basil

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

22.

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

Locke, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

27.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

28.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

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

30.

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

Lippmann, Walter

31.

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

32.

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

Young, Andrew

33.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Paul, Jean

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.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

42.

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

Kraus, Karl

43.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

44.

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

45.

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

George Bernard Shaw

46.

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

Lowell, James Russell

47.

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

Feoude

48.

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