Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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

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

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

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

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

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

10.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

11.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

18.

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

Dane, Frank

19.

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

Anouilh, Jean

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Scott Adams

24.

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

Hume, Basil

25.

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

Locke, John

26.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

27.

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

Hands, Terry

28.

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

29.

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

Lippmann, Walter

30.

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

Huxley, Aldous

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

34.

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.

35.

Carlyle, Thomas

36.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

37.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

38.

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

Kraus, Karl

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Morality is the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

Shuman, Rick

43.

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

Young, Andrew

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Greene, Graham

47.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

48.

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

Denis Diderot

49.

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

50.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.