Motivational Quotes

Morality

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

Best Quotes about Morality

We become moral when we are unhappy.

Proust, Marcel

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

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

Ferber, Edna

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

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

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

Saint Thomas Aquinas

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

George Bernard Shaw

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

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.

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

11.

The immorality of men triumphs over the amorality of women.

Kraus, Karl

12.

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

Feoude

13.

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

14.

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

Huxley, Aldous

15.

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

Kraus, Karl

16.

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

17.

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

Lowell, James Russell

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.

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

20.

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

Locke, John

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

Sallust

23.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle

24.

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

25.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

26.

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

27.

If your morals make you dreary, depend on it , they are wrong.

Robert Louis Stevenson

28.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

29.

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

Rand, Ayn

30.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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

Hands, Terry

32.

Might was the measure of right.

Lucan, F. L.

33.

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

34.

Time is the great equalizer in the field of morals.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

Friedrich Nietzsche

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

42.

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

Hazlitt, William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people.

Crowley, Aleister

46.

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

Denis Diderot

47.

The person who still blushes is not yet a degenerate.

Young

48.

Morality and expediency coincide more than the cynics allow.