Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Lippmann, Walter

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

Anouilh, Jean

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

Greene, Graham

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

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

Voltaire

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

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

10.

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

Wilde, Oscar

11.

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.

12.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Mencken, H. L.

18.

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

19.

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

Denis Diderot

20.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

21.

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

22.

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

Hazlitt, William

23.

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

24.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

25.

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

Shawcross, Lord

26.

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

27.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

28.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Scott Adams

36.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

37.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Hemingway, Ernest

38.

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

39.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

40.

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

41.

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

Feoude

42.

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

Huxley, Aldous

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

46.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

47.

We moralize among ruins.