Motivational Quotes

Morality

However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.

- Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

Best Quotes about Morality

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

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

Hume, Basil

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

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

Dane, Frank

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

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

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

Hands, Terry

10.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

11.

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

Denis Diderot

12.

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

George Bernard Shaw

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Anouilh, Jean

16.

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

17.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

18.

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

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.

There is no such thing as morality or immorality in thought. There is immoral emotion.

Wilde, Oscar

21.

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

22.

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

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.

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

25.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

26.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Kant, Immanuel

30.

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

Feoude

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Lowell, James Russell

34.

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

35.

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

Rand, Ayn

36.

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

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

Lippmann, Walter

38.

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

39.

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

40.

In Los Angeles, it's like they jog for two hours a day and then they think they're morally right. That's when you want to choke people, you know?

Neeson, Liam

41.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

42.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

43.

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

Sica, Vittorio De

44.

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

45.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Shawcross, Lord

49.

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

Scott Adams

50.

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