Motivational Quotes

Morality

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

- Hattersley, Roy

Best Quotes about Morality

The aim of morality is to give people a standard of action and a motive to work by which, they will not intensify each person's selfishness, but raise them up above it.

Sharpe, Cecil J.

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

Shuman, Rick

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

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

Hume, Basil

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

Huxley, Aldous

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

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

Kant, Immanuel

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

Kraus, Karl

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

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

15.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

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

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Feoude

22.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

23.

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

24.

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

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

27.

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

28.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

29.

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

30.

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

Locke, John

31.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

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

Anouilh, Jean

33.

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

Denis Diderot

34.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Dane, Frank

38.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

39.

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

Shawcross, Lord

40.

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

Young, Andrew

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

44.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

45.

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

46.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Lowell, James Russell

50.

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