Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Kraus, Karl

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

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

Young, Andrew

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

10.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

11.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.

Hattersley, Roy

12.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

13.

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

Shawcross, Lord

14.

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

Froude, James A.

15.

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

16.

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

Feoude

17.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

18.

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

Hazlitt, William

19.

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

Rand, Ayn

20.

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

Scott Adams

21.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

22.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

25.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

26.

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

27.

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

Dane, Frank

28.

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.

29.

The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others.

Bertrand Russell

30.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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

32.

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

Ferber, Edna

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Paul, Jean

39.

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

Huxley, Aldous

40.

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

41.

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

George Bernard Shaw

42.

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

43.

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

Anouilh, Jean

44.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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.

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

47.

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

Hume, Basil

48.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

49.

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

50.

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

Kant, Immanuel