Motivational Quotes

Morality

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.

Best Quotes about 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

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

Shawcross, Lord

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

Kant, Immanuel

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

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

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

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

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

Kraus, Karl

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

Huxley, Aldous

10.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

The soul is the captain and ruler of the life of morals.

Sallust

12.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

13.

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

14.

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

15.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

17.

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

Denis Diderot

18.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

19.

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

Paul, Jean

20.

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

21.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

22.

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

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

24.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

25.

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

26.

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

Lippmann, Walter

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

30.

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

Ferber, Edna

31.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

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

33.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

34.

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

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

Young, Andrew

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

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.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

47.

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

48.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

49.

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

50.

The higher the building the lower the morals.

Coward, Noel