Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

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

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

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

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

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

Dane, Frank

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

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

Kraus, Karl

10.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

11.

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

12.

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

George Bernard Shaw

13.

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

14.

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

Shuman, Rick

15.

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

16.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

17.

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

Kant, Immanuel

18.

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

Hume, Basil

19.

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

Lippmann, Walter

20.

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

21.

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

Hazlitt, William

22.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

23.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

24.

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

25.

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

Mencken, H. L.

26.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

27.

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

28.

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

Scott Adams

29.

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

Ferber, Edna

30.

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

31.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

32.

No moral system can rest solely on authority.

A. J. Ayer

33.

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

Rand, Ayn

34.

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

Feoude

35.

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

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.

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

Denis Diderot

38.

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

39.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

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.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

Shaw, George Bernard

42.

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

Huxley, Aldous

43.

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

44.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

45.

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.

46.

To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament.

Locke, John

47.

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

Wilde, Oscar

48.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

49.

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

50.

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