Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Sallust

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Hemingway, Ernest

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

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

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

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

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

Ferber, Edna

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

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

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

Paul, Jean

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Shuman, Rick

23.

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

Scott Adams

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Kraus, Karl

29.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

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.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

32.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Hands, Terry

36.

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

Anouilh, Jean

37.

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

38.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

39.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

41.

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

George Bernard Shaw

42.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Rand, Ayn

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Denis Diderot

50.

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