Motivational Quotes

Morality

To set up as a standard of public morality a notion which can neither be defined nor conceived is to open the door to every kind of tyranny.

- Weil, Simone

Best Quotes about Morality

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

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

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

Dane, Frank

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

Voltaire

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

Sallust

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

Ferber, Edna

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

Lowell, James Russell

11.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

13.

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

Hume, Basil

14.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

18.

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

Anouilh, Jean

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

24.

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

Hands, Terry

25.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

26.

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

Locke, John

27.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

28.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

29.

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

Mencken, H. L.

30.

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

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

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

33.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

35.

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

36.

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

Lippmann, Walter

37.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

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

Huxley, Aldous

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Kraus, Karl

50.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar