Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

- Hume, Basil

Best Quotes about Morality

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

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

Mencken, H. L.

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

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

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

The end never really justifies the meanness.

Hulse, E. Duane

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

Denis Diderot

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

Greene, Graham

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

Kraus, Karl

10.

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

Ayer, Sir Alfred Jules

11.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

Young, Andrew

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Feoude

18.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Colton, Charles Caleb

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Hazlitt, William

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

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

27.

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

Rand, Ayn

28.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

29.

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

Lawrence, D. H.

30.

We moralize among ruins.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

32.

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

Paul, Jean

33.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

34.

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

35.

Moral codes adjust themselves to environmental conditions.

Durant, William J.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Ferber, Edna

39.

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.

40.

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

Lowell, James Russell

41.

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

Hume, Basil

42.

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

Lippmann, Walter

43.

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

Locke, John

44.

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

45.

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

Wilde, Oscar

46.

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

Shawcross, Lord

47.

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

Huxley, Aldous

48.

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

49.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

50.

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