Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Paul, Jean

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

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

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

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

Lippmann, Walter

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

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

Greene, Graham

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

10.

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

11.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

16.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

20.

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

Huxley, Aldous

21.

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.

22.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

23.

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

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

Dane, Frank

26.

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

Denis Diderot

27.

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

Hume, Basil

28.

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

Kant, Immanuel

29.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

30.

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

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Hazlitt, William

32.

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

33.

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

Sallust

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

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

41.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

45.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

46.

Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.

Diderot, Denis

47.

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