Quotes About Morality

The signs of the old flame, I know them well. I pray that the earth gape deep enough to take me down or the almighty Father blast me with one bolt to the shades, the pale, glimmering shades in hell, the pit of night, before I dishonor you, my conscience, break your laws.

Darling, we're all whores under the skin, whether we give ourselves by calculation or by desire. It's just that some of us demand a higher price than others.

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the think veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency that, without replying, dazed and blinded, she bend her head as if to let her pelt f jagged hail, the drench of dirty water, bespatter her unrebuked.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books.

These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-legged monsters.

Later she wasn't so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Possibly the greatest good requires the existence of a slave class.

In normal circumstances a lovely young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their jewel, their centrepiece, which they run mad to protect, and die when ravished of.

You can't drive a bayonet through a chap's body in cold blood, he remembered him saying. And you can't go in for an exam. without drinking, said Edward.

as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes.

Chastity may be a fetish invented by certain societies for unknown reasons.

We have been taking into our mouths the bodies of dead birds.

The red setter who had been whining all night beside Flush on the floor was hauled off by a ruffian in a moleskin vest—to what fate? Was it better to be killed or to stay here? Which was worse—this life or that death?

All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.

My only grudge against nature was that I could not turn my Lolita inside out and apply voracious lips to her young matrix, her unknown heart, her nacreous liver, the sea-grapes of her lungs, her comely twin kidneys.

We who burrow in filth every day may be forgiven perhaps the one sin that ends all sins.

Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

No you can't take a pistol and plug a girl you don't even know simply because she attracts you.

In fact I believe that one day a reappraiser will come and declare that, far from having been a frivolous firebird, I was a rigid moralist: kicking sin, cuffing stupidity, ridiculing the vulgar and cruel—and assigning sovereign power to tenderness, talent and pride.

The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.

But after all we are not children, not illiterate juvenile delinquents, not English public school boys who after a night of homosexual romps have to endure the paradox of reading the Ancients in expurgated versions.

All great novels are great fairy tales.