Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Corruption is like a ball of snow, once it's set a rolling it must increase.

Colton, Charles Caleb

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

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

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

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

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

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

10.

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

Mencken, H. L.

11.

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

George Bernard Shaw

12.

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

13.

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

Denis Diderot

14.

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

15.

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

Shuman, Rick

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.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

18.

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

Locke, John

19.

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.

20.

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

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

Ferber, Edna

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.

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

Froude, James A.

26.

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

27.

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

Hands, Terry

28.

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

29.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

30.

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

31.

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

32.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

33.

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

Wilde, Oscar

34.

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

35.

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

Anouilh, Jean

36.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

37.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Lowell, James Russell

42.

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

43.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

44.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

48.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

49.

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

50.

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