Quotes About Morality

Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing.

I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment's notice.

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all.  Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.  That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.  They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins.  They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat. 

beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless.

Besides, nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one's self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us. And yet—

Men become old, but they never become good.

In fact, now you mention the subject, I have been very bad in my own small way. I don't think you should be so proud of that, though I am sure it must have been very pleasant.

But strange that I was not told That the brain can hold In a tiny ivory cell God's heaven and hell.

It is better to repent a sin than regret the loss of a pleasure.

Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not quite old enough to do that.

I would sooner lose my best friend than my worst enemy. To have friends, you know, one need only be good-natured; but when a man has no enemy left there must be something mean about him.

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

And once, or twice, to throw the dice is a gentlemanly game, But he does not win who plays with Sin in the secret house of shame

There is no such thing as good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral- immoral from a scientific point of view.

It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. 

The drawback of stealing a thing, is that one never knows how wonderful the thing that one steals is.

I never change. MRS. CHEVELEY: (elevating her eyebrows) Then life has taught you nothing? LADY CHILTERN: It has taught me that a person who has once been guilty of a dishonest and dishonorable action may be guilty of it a second time, and should be shunned. MRS. CHEVELEY: Whould that rule apply to everyone? LADY CHILTERN: Yes, to everyone, without exception. MRS. CHEVELEY: Then I am sorry for you, Gertrude, very sorry for you.

I don't think now that people can be divided into the good and the bad, as though they were two separate races or creations. What are called good women may have terrible things in them, mad moods of recklessness, assertion, jealousy, sin. Bad women. as they are termed, may have in them sorrow, repentence, pity, sacrifice.

No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

When they make up their ledger, they balance stupidity by wealth, and vice by hypocrisy.

He would never again tempt innocence. He would be good.

By the way, Dorian, he (Lord Henry) said, after a pause, what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose - how does the quotation run? - his own soul?