Quotes About Morality

But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?

il ne faut chercher que la vérité, sans s'occuper de la morale enseignée, orthodoxe et officielle ; de la morale, cette prétendue loi naturelle, indéfiniment variable, facultative, cette chose dosée différemment pour chaque pays, appréciée de façon nouvelle par chaque expert, prêtre ou législateur, et sans cesse modifiée par tout le monde.

Bientôt la conversation reprit entre les trois dames, que la présence de cette fille avait rendues subitement amies, presque intimes. Elles devaient faire, leur semblait-il, comme un faisceau de leurs dignités d'épouses en face de cette vendue sans vergogne; car l'amour légal le prend toujours de haut avec son libre confrère.

Institutionalised love always looks down on her more liberal sister

Mais, comme il éprouvait une peine infinie à découvrir des idées, il prit la spécialité des déclamations sur la décadence des moeurs sur l'abaissement des caractères, l'affaissement du patriotisme et l'anémie de l'honneur français. (Il avait trouvé le mot anémie dont il était fier.)

and you may know how little God thinks of money by observing on what bad and contemptible characters he often bestows it. Thomas Guthrie

Accept that people aren't good or bad. Good people can do bad things, and bad people can do good things.

Do what's right. Influence comes with a moral obligation to stand up for your principles and to help less fortunate people.

Character in decay is the theme of the great bulk of superior fiction.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

Don't overestimate the decency of the human race.

Sunday school: A prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on - I am not too sure.

Lawyer: one who protects us against robbery by taking away the temptation.

O pior governo é o mais moral. Um governo composto de cínicos é frequentemente mais tolerante e humano. Mas, quando os fanáticos tomam o poder, não há limite para a opressão

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics and chemistry.

Adultery is the application of democracy to love.

Morality is doing what is right regardless of what you are told. Obedience is doing what is told regardless of what is right.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

I dislike persons who change their basic ideas, and I dislike them when they change them for good reasons quite as much as when they change them for bad ones. A convert to a good idea is simply a man who confesses that he was formerly an ass—and is probably one still. When such a man favors me with a certificate that my eloquence has shaken him I feel about him precisely as I'd feel if he told me that he had started (or stopped) beating his wife on my recommendation.

A Puritan is not against bullfighting because of the pain it gives the bull, but because of the pleasure it gives the spectators.