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

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

Shuman, Rick

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

Shawcross, Lord

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

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

Lippmann, Walter

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

Dane, Frank

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

Ferber, Edna

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

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

10.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

12.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Young, Andrew

21.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

22.

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

Hazlitt, William

23.

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

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Kraus, Karl

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Hume, Basil

31.

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

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

35.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

36.

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

37.

A moral lesson is better expressed in short sayings than in long discourse.

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

46.

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

47.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

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.

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

Hands, Terry

50.

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