Quotes About Morality

Now we are not much more moral than the animals. We are only held down by the whips of society. If society said today, "I will not punish you if you steal," we should just make a rush for each other's property. It is the policeman that makes us moral. It is social opinion that makes us moral, and really we are little better than animals. We understand how much this is so in the secret of our own hearts. So let us not be hypocrites.

Virtue is the only friend which follows us even beyond the grave. Everything else ends with death.

The majority of us cannot see beyond a few years, just as some animals cannot see beyond a few steps. Just a little narrow circle — that is our world. We have not the patience to look beyond, and thus become immoral and wicked. This is our weakness, our powerlessness.

but for a man to constantly do good without caring for the approbation of his fellow men is indeed the highest sacrifice man can perform.

The cow never tells a lie, and the stone never steals, but, nevertheless, the cow remains a cow and the stone a stone. Man steals and man tells lies, and again it is man that becomes a god.

How is it that one is born of good parents, receives a good education and becomes a good man, while another comes from besotted parents and ends on the gallows? How do you explain this inequality without implicating God?

inequality without implicating God?

The selfless and unattached man may live in the very heart of a crowded and sinful city; he will not be touched by sin.

In the first place, a man who can work for five days, or even for five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant.

It is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite.

Stan Bad guy can't win. It's a morality tale. One way or the other - he's gotta go down.

why, after all this sex, am I still ashamed about sex? Why, when I look at a woman, does the guilt follow so quickly upon the desire that the two have become indistinguishable?

His brother and sister were the dearest people, but dreadfully good; they thought everything wrong. - William Price describing Fanny and Edmund to Georgiana Darcy

Una cuarta característica de todos los superjefes es la integridad. No utilizo la palabra en el sentido coloquial de "honestidad", sino más bien como la estricta adherencia a una visión básica o sentido de sí mismo.

The three hardest tasks in the world are neither physical feats nor intellectual achievements, but moral acts: to return love for hate, to include the excluded, and to say, "I was wrong.

It's odd that the people who worry whether certain plays are "morally offensive" so rarely worry about the moral offensiveness of war, poverty, bigotry.

Achieving the good life is more a matter of being than of doing or giving. It calls for intense self-scrutiny, a relentless honesty about one's motives, and a persistent feeling that we are no better—and perhaps worse—than those we are trying to help.

But if "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder, so is "obscenity.

The world has always been betrayed by decent men with bad ideals.

What a pity it is that we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!

I am glad you like what I said of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (prison and mental hospital reformer). She is very unpopular with the clergy; examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose and give one to distressing comparisons; we long to burn her alive.

I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil.

Watching these happy beings for whom weeping was impossible, he had become incapable of grief; watching their inconsistencies, he had become incapable of knowing right from wrong; disregarded by them he had become incapable of disappointment.

But we cannot all be saints. Some of us have to be stewards.