Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Hume, Basil

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

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

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

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

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

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

A woman can look both moral and exciting -- if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

Ferber, Edna

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

15.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

19.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

20.

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

21.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

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

Kraus, Karl

25.

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

26.

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

Hands, Terry

27.

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

Froude, James A.

28.

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

29.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

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

31.

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

Paul, Jean

32.

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

Hazlitt, William

33.

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

Dane, Frank

34.

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

Lippmann, Walter

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Denis Diderot

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.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

41.

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

Feoude

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Young, Andrew

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.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

48.

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

49.

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

Wilde, Oscar

50.

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