Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Lavater, Johann Kaspar

Best Quotes about 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.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

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

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

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

Young, Andrew

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. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Henry David Thoreau

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

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

10.

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

11.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

12.

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

13.

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

Hands, Terry

14.

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

15.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

16.

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

Sallust

17.

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

18.

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

Huxley, Aldous

19.

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

Locke, John

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

23.

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

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

26.

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

Dane, Frank

27.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

28.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

29.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

30.

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

31.

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

Paul, Jean

32.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

34.

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

Rand, Ayn

35.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

36.

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

Ferber, Edna

37.

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

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Feoude

41.

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

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.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

44.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

45.

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

Lowell, James Russell

46.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Froude, James A.

50.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules