Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Kant, Immanuel

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

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

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

Lawrence, D. H.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

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

Shuman, Rick

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

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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

Hemingway, Ernest

10.

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

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

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

Anouilh, Jean

13.

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

Froude, James A.

14.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Kraus, Karl

22.

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

Ferber, Edna

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Paul, Jean

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Hazlitt, William

30.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

31.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

32.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

33.

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

Greene, Graham

34.

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

35.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

36.

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

37.

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

Mencken, H. L.

38.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Hume, Basil

46.

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

47.

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

Locke, John

48.

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

Young, Andrew

49.

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

Huxley, Aldous

50.

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.