Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

Mencken, H. L.

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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

12.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

13.

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

14.

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

Greene, Graham

15.

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

Wilde, Oscar

16.

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

17.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

18.

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

Rand, Ayn

19.

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

Dane, Frank

20.

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

21.

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

Sallust

22.

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

Hume, Basil

23.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

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

George Bernard Shaw

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Hands, Terry

30.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

31.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

32.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

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.

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

Huxley, Aldous

38.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

40.

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

41.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

42.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

43.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

44.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Froude, James A.

48.

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

Ferber, Edna

49.

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