Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Denis Diderot

Best Quotes about Morality

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

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

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

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

14.

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

Paul, Jean

15.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

16.

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

Hume, Basil

17.

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

18.

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

19.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

20.

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

Shawcross, Lord

21.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

22.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel

23.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

24.

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

Froude, James A.

25.

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

Lippmann, Walter

26.

All sects are different, because they come from men; morality is everywhere the same, because it comes from God.

Voltaire

27.

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

28.

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

Rand, Ayn

29.

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

Huxley, Aldous

30.

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

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.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

33.

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

Kraus, Karl

34.

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

35.

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

36.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

37.

Morality is always the product of terror; its chains and strait-waistcoats are fashioned by those who dare not trust others, because they dare not trust themselves, to walk in liberty.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

39.

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

40.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

41.

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

Feoude

42.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

46.

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

Mencken, H. L.

47.

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

Kant, Immanuel

48.

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

49.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

50.

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

Lowell, James Russell