Motivational Quotes

Morality

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

- A. J. Ayer

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

Anouilh, Jean

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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

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

Ferber, Edna

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

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

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

Kant, Immanuel

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

10.

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

11.

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

Froude, James A.

12.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

13.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

14.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Dane, Frank

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

22.

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

23.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

24.

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

25.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

26.

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

Lowell, James Russell

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

The new so called morality has too often the old immorality condoned.

Shawcross, Lord

32.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

Huxley, Aldous

34.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

35.

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

Shuman, Rick

36.

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

37.

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

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

39.

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

Mencken, H. L.

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.

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

Paul, Jean

42.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

43.

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

Hume, Basil

44.

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

45.

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

Feoude

46.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

47.

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.

48.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

49.

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

50.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel