Moral Quotes

1. "How can we say nobody's perfect if there is no perfect to compare to? Perfection implies that there really is a right and wrong way to be. And what type of perfection is the best type? Moral perfection? Aesthetic? Physiological? Mental?"
Author: A.S. King

2. "What on earth prompted you to take a hand in this?""I don't know. My… my code of morals, perhaps.""Your code of morals. What code, if I may ask?""Comprehension."
Author: Albert Camus

3. "Ordinary morality is only for ordinary people."
Author: Aleister Crowley

4. "If we value what we've inherited for free - from other women - surely it's right morally and ethically for us to wake up and say, 'I'm a feminist. '"
Author: Annie Lennox

5. "Like every aspect of cancer I've weathered thus far, today's experience was not at all demoralizing, expensive or humiliating. No, it was just plain fun."
Author: April Winchell

6. "All I know is, unselfishness is the only moral principle," said Jessica Pratt, "the noblest principle and a sacred duty and much more important than freedom. Unselfishness is the only way to happiness. I would have everybody who refused to be unselfish shot. To put them out of their misery. They can't be happy anyway."
Author: Ayn Rand

7. "I'm frankly sick and tired of the political preachers across this country telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in "A," "B," "C" and "D." Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me? And I am even more angry as a legislator who must endure the threats of every religious group who thinks it has some God-granted right to control my vote on every roll call in the Senate. I am warning them today: I will fight them every step of the way if they try to dictate their moral convictions to all Americans in the name of "conservatism."
Author: Barry M. Goldwater

8. "There was, I think, a prevailingimpression common to the provincial mind, that his misfortune wasthe result of the defective moral quality of his being a stranger."
Author: Bret Harte

9. "While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend."
Author: C.S. Lewis

10. "Miller concludes: "To a culture that believes they ‘go to heaven' based on whether or not they are morally pure, or that they understand some theological ideas, or that they are very spiritual, Jesus is completely unnecessary. At best, He is an afterthought, a technicality by which we become morally pure, or a subject of which we know, or a founding father of our woo-woo spirituality."5"
Author: Carl Medearis

11. "Some say there is enjoyment in looking back to painful experience past; but at this day I can scarcely bear to review the times to which I allude: the moral degradation, blent with physical suffering, from too distressing a recollection ever to be willingly dwelt on"
Author: Charlotte Brontë

12. "I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

13. "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."
Author: Clive Owen

14. "Worship is the proper response of all moral, sentient beings to God, ascribing all honor and worth to their Creator-God precisely because he is worthy, delightfully so."
Author: D.A. Carson

15. "In the moral realm, there is very little consensus left in Western countries over the proper basis of moral behavior. And because of the power of the media, for millions of men and women the only venue where moral questions are discussed and weighed is the talk show, where more often than not the primary aim is to entertain, even shock, not to think. When Geraldo and Oprah become the arbiters of public morality, when the opinion of the latest media personality is sought on everything from abortion to transvestites, when banality is mistaken for profundity because [it's] uttered by a movie star or a basketball player, it is not surprising that there is less thought than hype. Oprah shapes more of the nation's grasp of right and wrong than most of the pulpits in the land. Personal and social ethics have been removed from the realms of truth and structures of thoughts; they have not only been relativized, but they have been democratized and trivialized."
Author: D.A. Carson

16. "Businessmen should not put their finger in politics, because they tend to think only of their own self-interest. But I worry about the low morale in Italian industry and the lack of government initiatives to help the poor."
Author: Diego Della Valle

17. "Intellectual representations are the activity itself, dependent on a kind of consciousness that is skeptical, engaged, unremittingly devote to rational investigation and moral judgement; and this puts the individual on record and on the line. Knowing how to use language well and knowing when to intervene in language are two essential features of intellectual action."
Author: Edward W. Said

18. "The difficulty was not that of following a moral principle at personal cost; the difficulty was that of knowing what to do when there is more than one principal, and when the principles clash."
Author: Elton Trueblood

19. "In reviewing his own moral career, the stigmatized individual may single out and retrospectively elaborate experiences which serve for him to account for his coming to the beliefs and practices that he now has regarding his own kind and normals."
Author: Erving Goffman

20. "A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality."
Author: Garrett Hardin

21. "While the moral force of Judeo-Christian tradition and the law have sought to purify the penis, and to restrict its seed to the sanctified institution of matrimony, the penis is not by nature a monogamous organ. It knows no moral code. It was designed by nature for waste, it craves variety, and nothing less than castration will eliminate the allure of prostitution, fornication adultery, or pornography."
Author: Gay Talese

22. "Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul."
Author: George Bancroft

23. "Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected."
Author: George Washington

24. "The morality of customs,the spirit of the laws, produces the man emancipated from the law."
Author: Gilles Deleuze

25. "Esistono certi scrittori religiosi o meglio morali, i quali sostengono che in questo mondo la virtù è la via sicura della felicità e il vizio quella dell'infelicità: dottrina veramente sana e consolante, contro cui abbiamo un'obiezione sola, e cioè che non è vera."
Author: Henry Fielding

26. "Projecting a persuasive image of a desirable and practical future is extremely important to high morale, to dynamism, to consensus, and in general to help the wheels of society turn smoothly."
Author: Herman Kahn

27. "Les souffrances morales, auprès desquelles pâlissent les douleurs physiques, excitent cependant moins de pitié, parce-qu'on ne les voit point."
Author: Honoré De Balzac

28. "When the evening was over, Anne could not but be amused at the idea of her coming to Lyme, to preach patience and resignation to a young man whom she had never seen before; nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination."
Author: Jane Austen

29. "I cannot leave this subject as though its just treatment wholly depended either on our own pledges or economic facts. The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable, - abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe. Some preach it in the name of Justice. In the great events of man's history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations Justice is not so simple. And if it were, nations are not authorized, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents of rulers."
Author: John Maynard Keynes

30. "The thought of building a life around minimal morality or minimal significance—a life defined by the question, "What is permissible?"—felt almost disgusting to me. I didn't want a minimal life. I didn't want to live on the outskirts of reality. I wanted to understand the main thing about life and pursue it."
Author: John Piper

31. "God has ordained that Satan have a long leash with God holding on to the leash because he knows that when we walk in and out of those temptations, struggling with both the physical effects that they bring and the moral effects that they bring, more of God's glory will shine."
Author: John Piper

32. "At forty-five, I feel grateful almost daily to be the adult I wished I could be when I was seventeen. I work on my arm strength at the gym; I've become pretty good with tools. At the same time, almost daily, I lose battles with the seventeen-year-old who's still inside me. I eat half a box of Oreos for lunch, I binge on TV, I make sweeping moral judgments. I run around in torn jeans, I drink martinis on a Tuesday night, I stare at beer-commercial cleavage. I define as uncool any group to which I can't belong. I feel the urge to key Range Rovers and slash their tires; I pretend I'm never going to die. You never stop waiting for the real story to start, because the only real story, in the end, is that you die."
Author: Jonathan Franzen

33. "My exile was not only a physical one, motivated exclusively by political reasons; it was also a moral, social, ideological and sexual exile."
Author: Juan Goytisolo

34. "Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul."
Author: Karl Jaspers

35. "Without man there would be no evil. But there was also no good, nothing moral built over the world of fact. Humans were responsible for it all."
Author: Karl Marlantes

36. "I hadn't seen Reth since he had come to visit me in the hospital after I released the souls, and I never wanted to again.Him or any of the other creepy, manipulative, amoral, psychotic, insert-furhter-negative-adjectives-of-your-choice-here faeries. Especially after today, if the sylph was with them. I wasn't about to draw their attention to me by holding hands through the Faerie Paths.She smiled. "I understand. In fact, one of my first initiatives was weaning IPCA from faerie magic dependancy. I think you'll be pleased to find that we now use them a mere forty percent of the amount we used to.""Forty percent, huh? That's still about one hundred percent more than I'm happy with."
Author: Kiersten White

37. "„So ist es," sagte die Herzogin, „und die Moral davon ist – Mit Liebe und Gesange hält man die Welt im Gange!"„Wer sagte denn," flüsterte Alice, „es geschehe dadurch, daß Jeder vor seiner Thüre fege."
Author: Lewis Carroll

38. "Forty-five percent of Iraqi citizens think it is morally okay to attack American troops."
Author: Marty Meehan

39. "Apa yang sudah dibaca Kartini digenggamnya terus di dalam tangannya, dan ikut memperkuat moralnya"
Author: Pramoedya Ananta Toer

40. "If we can find God only as he is revealed in nature we have no moral God."
Author: Reinhold Niebuhr

41. "The great proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was a product of the marriage of the exhibition as a way of awakening intelligent interest in the visitor with the growth of collections that was associated with empire and middle-class affluence. Attendance at museums was as much associated with moral improvement as with explanation of the human or natural world."
Author: Richard Fortey

42. "But I think it is a serious issue to wonder about the other platonic absolutes of say beauty and morality."
Author: Roger Penrose

43. "Let's think about living some day in a world made of friendship, with hearts beating with duty and feeling, and people and animals and trees and birds and lawns. We'll have a morality never written in a book. A morality that looks in surprise at what we do now and what we'll do in the future, what we think now and what we will think. Then we'll have a longer friendship, Bug-eyes. Then, don't worry. My friend Panço will agree. He won't talk about church morality. He'll tell his children about the extraordinary beauty of friendship."
Author: Sait Faik Abasıyanık

44. "Is is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ. It should be blindingly obvious that beliefs of this sort will do little to help us create a durable future for ourselves - socially, economically, environmentally, or geopolitically. Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the US government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religion dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency."
Author: Sam Harris

45. "To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints on active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simpily an all-pervasive system."
Author: Simone De Beauvoir

46. "It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves...To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save."
Author: Simone Weil

47. "Trust in tomorrow...Every day of your life, there's been a tomorrow. I promise you, there'll be a tomorrow.—Alex Morales to Miranda Evans"
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer

48. "Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another."
Author: Susan Neiman

49. "I would wish this book could take the form of a plea for everlasting peace, a plea from one who knows... Or it would be fine to confirm the odd beliefs about war: it's horrible, but it's a crucible of men and events and, in the end, it makes more of a man out of you.But, still, none of these notions seems right. Men are killed, dead human beings are heavy and awkward to carry, things smell different in Vietnam, soldiers are afraid and often brave, drill sergeants are boors, some men think the war is proper and just and others don't and most don't care. Is that the stuff for a morality lesson, even for a theme?Do dreams offer lessons? Do nightmares have themes, do we awaken and analyze them and live our lives and advise others as a result? Can the foot soldier teach anything important about war, merely for having been there? I think not. He can tell war stories."
Author: Tim O'Brien

50. "-It is possible to vastly compress most learning. In a surprising number of cases, it is possible to do something in 1-10 months that is assumed to take 1-10 years. -The more you compress things, the more physical limiters become a bottleneck. All learning is physically limited. The brain is dependent on finite quantities of neurotransmitters, memories require REM and non-REM (NREM) sleep for consolidation, etc. The learning graph is not unlike the stress-recovery-hyperadaptation curves of weight training. -The more extreme your ambition, just as in sports, the more you need performance enhancement via unusual schedules, diet, drugs, etc. -Most important: due to the bipolar nature of the learning process, you can forecast setbacks. If you don't, you increase the likelihood of losing morale and quitting before the inflection point."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

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