Morals Quotes

We middles see the world in shades of grey rather than in the clear blacks and whites of committed animal activists and their equally vociferous opponents

Hal Herzog

The distemper of which, as a community, we are sick, should be considered rather as a moral than a political malady.

William Wilberforce

Flies purify the air, and plays--the morals.

Anton Chekhov

What I should do and what I want to do are two opposing forces. I have no idea which way I am going to end up.

Ava Zavora

We do the right things at the wrong time because we think we are doing the right thing and the wrong things at the wrong times simply because we want to.

Zack Somuyiwa

What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.

Jo Nesbø

But even if they could go home it would be difficult for me to tell you what the moral of the story is. In some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears', for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house". The moral of 'Snow White' is "Never eat apples". The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

Lemony Snicket

Dishonesty is like a boomerang. Just when you think all is well, it hits you in the back of your head.

Pavan Choudary

What then is the relation of law to morality? Law cannot prescribe morality, it can prescribe only external actions and therefore it should prescribe only those actions whose mere fulfillment, from whatever motive, the state adjudges to be conducive to welfare. What actions are these? Obviously such actions as promote the physical and social conditions requisite for the expression and development of free—or moral—personality.... Law does not and cannot cover all the ground of morality. To turn all moral obligations into legal obligations would be to destroy morality. Happily it is impossible. No code of law can envisage the myriad changing situations that determine moral obligations. Moreover, there must be one legal code for all, but moral codes vary as much as the individual characters of which they are the expression. To legislate against the moral codes of one’s fellows is a very grave act, requiring for its justification the most indubitable and universally admitted of social gains, for it is to steal their moral codes, to suppress their characters.

R.M. Maciver

The morals of societies are defined by how they treat a strange woman.

M.F. Moonzajer

In insisting that personal habit and political action be one and the same, absolutist moralizing limits the possibilities of both.

Heather Paxson

Eagle rises to the top of the precipice with its wings; man, to the top of the honour, with his morals!

Mehmet Murat ildan

First people lose their hair, then their vices, then their motivation. Then a toupee brings it all flowing back.

Bauvard

Often,our immediate reaction to a sudden crisis help us save ourselves. Our response to gradual crises that creep up upon us, on the other hand,may be so adaptive as to ultimately lead to self-destruction.

Amish Tripathi

Life is short. Life is uncertain. But we know that we have today. And we have each other. I believe that for each of us, there is a place on the frontlines.

Eric Greitens

There’s not really such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people, there’s just like…humanity. And it gets broken sometimes.

Isaac Marion

Till it does come, you know, we women never mean to have anybody. It is a thing of course among us, that every man is refused, till he offers.

Jane Austen

And you have to understand this, that a prince, especially a new one, cannot observe all those things for which men are esteemed, being often forced, in order to maintain the state, to act contrary to faith, friendship, humanity, and religion. “ The Prince, XVIII, 5

Niccolò Machiavelli

True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.

Immanuel Kant

One may as well be asleep as to read for anything but to improve his mind and morals, and regulate his conduct.

René Sterne

Was there ever a great true love? Anyone who became the object of my obsession and not simply my affections?...I could not let myself become that unmindful. Isn't that what love is - losing your mind? You don't care what people think. You don't see your beloved's faults, the slight stinginess, the bit of carelessness, the occasional streak of meanness. You don't mind that he is beneath you socially, educationally, financially, and morally - that's the worst, I think, deficient morals.

Amy Tan

My friends, I like them; my morals, I like them more!

Mehmet Murat ildan

This is dreadful! Not the suffering and death of the animals, but that man suppresses in himself, unnecessarily, the highest spiritual capacity—that of sympathy and pity toward living creatures like himself—and by violating his own feelings becomes cruel. And how deeply seated in the human heart is the injunction not to take life!

Leo Tolstoy

I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners."Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.

Mark Twain

Sometimes we punish our selves the most.

William Shakespeare

But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome?

Carl Sagan

I’m just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money and they think it’s all okay because it’s just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they’re bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever.

Paul Murray

There is but one rule of conduct for a man: to do the right thing. The cost may be dear in money, in friends, in influence, in labor, in a prolonged and painful sacrifice; but the cost not to do right is far more far more dear: you pay in the integrity of your manhood, in honor, in truth, in character. You forfeit your soul's content and for a timely gain, you barter the infinities.

Lucius H. Bugbee

individuals are concerned notwith the moral issue of realizing these standards, but withthe amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression thatthese standards are being realized. Our activity, then, islargely concerned with moral matters, but as performers wedo not have a moral concern in these moral matters. Asperformers we are merchants of morality. Our day is givenover to intimate contact with the goods we display and ourminds are filled with intimate understandings of them; but itmay well be that the more attention we give to these goods,th e more d is ta n t we feel from them and from those who arebelieving enough to buy them. To use a different imagery,the very obligation and profitablility of appearing always ina steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forcesus to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways ofthe stage.

Erving Goffman

If anthropological data suggests something short of the ideal, that is not because nothing is universal, but because two universals are in conflict: universal moral knowledge and universal desire to evade it. The first one we owe to our creation. The second we owe to our fall.

J. Budziszewski

Anyway, there were thousands of Kantoreks, all of them convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that was the most comfortable for themselves.But as far as we are concerned, that is the very root of their moral bankruptcy.

Erich Maria Remarque

A folktale without a moral is merely a whimsy.

Stephen Sondheim

Modernization, socialization, and progression doesn’t alter nor permit discarding the morals and the laws one should abide themselves too.

Avra Amar Filion

In some stories, it's easy. The moral of "The Three Bears," for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house." The moral of "Snow White" is "Never eat apples." The moral of World War One is "Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

Lemony Snicket

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win, and their participants know it.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I value ethical standards, of course. But in a culture like ours – which devalues or dismisses the reality and power of the inner life – ethics too often becomes an external code of conduct, an objective set of rules we are told to follow, a moral exoskeleton we put on hoping to prop ourselves up. The problem with exoskeletons is simple: we can slip them off as easily as we can don them.

Parker J. Palmer

The generation that bought the most shoes and crippled the moral footing

Dean Cavanagh

Everybody wants to be part of a success story, But no one want to be the writer of this story.

innocent eneojo felix

Napoleon would always be extremely fastidious when it came to other people's morals, although his own were frequently questionable.

Leslie Carroll

Now I was nothing but a shade of grey - my moral compass ambiguous.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

Intellectual generalities are always interesting, but generalities in morals mean absolutely nothing.

Oscar Wilde

History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetites, which shake the public with the same t —“troublous storms that tossThe private state, and render life unsweet.”These vices are the causes of those storms. Religion, morals, laws, prerogatives, privileges, liberties, rights of men, are the pretexts.

Edmund Burke

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

Mark Twain

It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Albert Einstein

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

Patti Smith

Morality was probably the invention of unattractive men. Whom else does it benefit really

Manu Joseph

Of course it is,’ said the Duchess, who seemed ready to agree to everythingthat Alice said; ‘there’s a large mustard-mine near here. And the moralof that is– “The more there is of mine, the less there is of yours.

Lewis Carroll

Montaigne said long ago: "Were I not to follow the straight road for its straightness, I should follow it for having found by experience that in the end it is commonly the happiest and most useful track." The doctrine of interest rightly understood is not then new, but among the Americans of our time it finds universal acceptance; it has become popular there; you may trace it at the bottom of all their actions, you will remark it in all they say.

Alexis de Tocqueville

All around the Mediterranean you'll find cultures that believe men can't control themselves and shouldn't have to try.

Sheri S. Tepper

If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

Robert Louis Stevenson

SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field.

P.D. James

Evolution of mind was altogether another matter and belonged to another science, but whether one traced descent from the shark or the wolf was immaterial even in morals. This matter had been discussed for ages without scientific result. La Fontaine and other fabulists maintained that the wolf, even in morals, stood higher than man; and in view of the late civil war, Adams had doubts of his own on the facts of moral evolution:

Henry Adams

It was not that Madame Santeuil's moral values had altered, but only her view of the moral values of others.

Marcel Proust

He thanked God that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. Saints in heaven - how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime - ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud- dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment-

Jack London

...there’s a great deal which I don’t understandin people. In a human being everything should be beautiful: the face, the clothes, the soul, the thoughts. . . .Often I see a beautiful face and clothes, so beautiful that my head gets giddy with rapture; but as for the soul and thoughts,my God! In a beautiful outside there’s sometimes hidden such a black soul that no whitening can rub it off...

Anton Chekhov

Politics really must be a rotten profession considering what awful moral cowards most politicians become as soon as they get the job.

Martha Gellhorn

If there is a moral to this part of the story, and I distrust morals in the same way that I distrust beginnings, it is simply this: know that with which you deal.

Neil Gaiman

Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture and very much to our credit.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Morals are like social classes, there are poor and rich people.

Eyden I.

Sometimes we punish ourselves the most.

William Shakespeare

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Morals Quotes

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