Motivational Quotes

Morality

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.

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

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

George Bernard Shaw

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

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

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Voltaire

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

Lawrence, D. H.

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

Feoude

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

10.

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

Ferber, Edna

11.

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

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

14.

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

Anouilh, Jean

15.

The person is always happy who is in the presence of something they cannot know in full. A person as advanced far in the study of morals who has mastered the difference between pride and vanity.

Chamfort, Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De

16.

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

Paul, Jean

17.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

18.

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

19.

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

Greene, Graham

20.

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

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

Sallust

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

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

Hazlitt, William

26.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

27.

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

28.

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

29.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

30.

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

31.

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

Hume, Basil

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

36.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

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.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

Bevan, Aneurin

40.

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

41.

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

Kant, Immanuel

42.

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

43.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

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

49.

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

Scott Adams

50.

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