Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Anouilh, Jean

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.

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

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

10.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

11.

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

Scott Adams

12.

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

Hume, Basil

13.

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

14.

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

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.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

17.

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

18.

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

Greene, Graham

19.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. So aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

Thoreau, Henry David

20.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

21.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Shawcross, Lord

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

27.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Kraus, Karl

31.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

32.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

Hands, Terry

34.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

35.

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

Ferber, Edna

36.

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

Sallust

37.

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

38.

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

Huxley, Aldous

39.

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

40.

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

Shuman, Rick

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

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.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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