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

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

Anouilh, Jean

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

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

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

Wilde, Oscar

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

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

11.

I have never regarded politics as the arena of morals. It is the arena of interest.

Bevan, Aneurin

12.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

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

14.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

15.

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

Lippmann, Walter

16.

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

17.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

18.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

19.

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

20.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

21.

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

22.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Don't be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

29.

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

Paul, Jean

30.

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

Greene, Graham

31.

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

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

35.

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

Shuman, Rick

36.

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

37.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

38.

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

Hume, Basil

39.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

40.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

42.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

43.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

George Bernard Shaw

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.

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

46.

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

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.

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

Lowell, James Russell

49.

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

50.

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