Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

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

Anouilh, Jean

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

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

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

Hazlitt, William

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

Kant, Immanuel

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

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

Hume, Basil

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

Lippmann, Walter

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

10.

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

11.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Scott Adams

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

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

Huxley, Aldous

24.

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

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Kraus, Karl

27.

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

28.

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

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Zimmermann, Johann Georg

33.

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

34.

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

Dane, Frank

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.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

38.

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

Denis Diderot

39.

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

Greene, Graham

40.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

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.

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

Sallust

43.

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

Ferber, Edna

44.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

45.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

50.

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