Morality Quotes

Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

~ Stephen Jay Gould

for that men have been good does not suffice for them to continue being good, unless one cares about it to the end.

~ Xenphon Ephesius

Life is a manifestation of the fundamental laws of physics, and in its highest form, life manifests the fundamental laws of physics as a human organism endowed with a capacity for moral judgement.

~ Joseph B.h. Mcmillan

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...

~ Cheikh Anta Diop

Marx hated weakness in men, and considered the making of moral judgements as the last resort of the weak. To say 'That is morally wrong' is implicitly to say ' I am powerless to stop that, so I will inveigh against it'.

~ Paul Robert Wolff

....I came to consider betrayal a moral violation of another's humanity—akin to torture.

~ Sandra Lee Dennis

The worst type of man behaves as badly in his waking life as some men do in their dreams.

~ Plato

Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy.

~ Ella Leya

That is morality,I make myself imagine that it is personal.

~ Louis De Bernières

Author:A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.

~ Leopold Throckmorton

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.

~ George Saunders

Do what is right and be prepared to pay the price.

~ Christopher Taylor

We have laws in our country that tell us not to murder or steal and we have police that enforce them. The question is whether you personally need the police to watch you. If they disappeared would you begin killing and thieving because you know no one will come after you, or will you carry on not doing it because it is what you actually believe is right?

~ Lewis N. Roe

Just handle what's in front of you now. and the future will take care of itself. Otherwise, you'll spend most of your life wondering which foot you'll use to step off the curb when you're still only halfway to the corner.

~ Dan Millman

We all need a moral compass. Before you say or do anything, check your inner G.P.S. by asking, Does this show respect for GodPeopleSelf?

~ Pam Farrel

One peculiarity of our present [ethical] climate is that we care much more about our rights than about our 'good'. For previous thinkers about ethics, such as those who wrote the Upanishads, or Confucius, or Plato, or the founders of the Christian tradition, the central concern was the state of one's soul, meaning some personal state of justice or harmony. Such a state might include resignation or renunciation, or detachment, or obedience, or knowledge, especially self-knowledge. For Plato there could be no just political order except one populated by just citizens.... Today we tend not to believe that; we tend to think that modern constitutional democracies are fine regardless of the private vices of those within them. We are much more nervous talking about our good: it seems moralistic, or undemocratic, or elitist. Similarly, we are nervous talking about duty. The Victorian ideal of a life devoted to duty, or a calling, is substantially lost to us. So a greater proportion of our moral energy goes to protecting claims against each other, and that includes protecting the state of our soul as purely private, purely our own business.

~ Simon Blackburn

Chabrias, ever preoccupied to offer the gods the worship due them, was disturbed by the progress of sects of this kind among the populace of large cities; he feared for the welfare of our ancient religions, which yoke men to no dogma whatsoever, but lend themselves, on the contrary, to interpretations as varied as nature itself; they allow austere spirits who desire to do so to invent for themselves a higher morality, but they do not bind the masses to precepts so strict as to engender immediate constraint and hypocrisy.

~ Marguerite Yourcenar

For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected.

~ Henry Sidgwick

The law says you have the right to hold a nigger, but begging the law's pardon, it lies. . . Is everything right because the law allows it? Suppose they'd pass a law taking away your liberty and making you a slave?

~ Solomon Northup

...the standard for moral behaviour must be part of God's nature. He did not create morality, he is morality.

~ Lewis N. Roe

At the same time, however, the necessity for economic change in our countries has led us to conceive laws and accept traditions often at the expense of the individual person. Just when many are becoming conscious of the fundamental heritage of the Judeo-Christian tradition to respect each human person, friend or foe, within the actual structure of our society to apply this truth. The very efficiency demanded by our technocratic industrial society renders the life of the old, the unstable and the handicapped almost impossible. as the values of efficiency, individualism, and wealth become the only motivations, they tend to stifle the profound aspirations of man so that little by little he loses all sense of fellowship and community.

~ Jean Vanier

Author:A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape, picking up free words and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later)working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.

~ Leopold Throckmorton

There is no enemy that respect and love will not conquer. The moral authority for survival comes from respect.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Men can be in love with literary figures, with poetic and mythological figures, but let them meet with Artemis, with Venus, with any of the goddesses of love, and then they start hurling moral judgments.

~ Anaïs Nin

How simple love would be, Younger Brother, if we only had to bestow it on those who deserved it. Yet what would it be worth? If you gave a poor man a silver coin then that would be a gift. If you expected him to pay you back, then that would make it a loan. We do not loan our love, Lantern. We give it freely.

~ David Gemmell

It is said that man is wolf to man. I find this very unfair to wolves.

~ Frans De Waal

Nothing is more scandalous than a man that is proud of his humility.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities.

~ Emil M. Cioran

A group of politicians deciding to dump a President because his morals are bad is like the Mafia getting together to bump off the Godfather for not going to church on Sunday.

~ Russell Baker

The good Lord wouldn't have put it in your heart if it wasn't right.

~ Neal Shusterman

A philosopher is someone who promotes moral excellence, argues for moral excellence, and gets other people to behave morally and excellently based on those arguments.

~ Stefan Molyneux

Truly, you understand the reverse art of alchemy, the depreciating of the most valuable things! Try, just for once, another recipe, in order not to realise as hitherto the opposite of what you mean to attain: deny those good things, withdraw from them the applause of the populace and discourage the spread of them, make them once more the concealed chastities of solitary souls, and say: morality is something forbidden! Perhaps you will thus attract to your cause the sort of men who are only of any account, I mean the heroic. But then there must be something formidable in it, and not as hitherto something disgusting!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Over time, I realized I wasn't necessarily seeing people or things at their best or worst; instead, I was simply seeing things as they were.There didn't seem to be a moral high road to take in most situations, and What's the right thing to do? wasn't an easy question.

~ Dee Williams

Just as Man developed morals and ethical behavior over thousands of years of evolution; so, too, did he invent an authority figure to enforce these behaviors - God.

~ Lex Allen

The character of God is an unchanging Northstar five which to find our way through a world of moral complexity.

~ Kirby Anderson

In the future system, you will decide how your bodies look and feel, but only til then will you have the choice.

~ David L. Lloyd

Before aligning the body to the future, the mind has to straighten out from the impairment or religion.

~ David L. Lloyd

Histories of morality are rarely written in order to inform the reader.

~ John Gray

Moral ideas about what constitutes a meritorious or meaningful use of one’s life and opportunities produce specific attitudes towards drug use and intoxication.

~ Daniel Waterman