morality quotes

  • The true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched with emotion.

    - Matthew Arnold
      Literature and Dogma, ch.1.

  • We do not look in great cities for our best morality.

    -Jane Austen
      Mansfield Park, ch.9.

  • Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion.To attack the first isnottoassail the last.To pluck the mask from the face of the Pharisee, is not to lift an impious hand to the Crown of Thorns.

    - Charlotte Bronte« 
      Jane Eyre (2nd edn), preface.

  •    All that I know surely about morality and the obligations of man, I owe to football.

    - Albert Camus
     'What I owe to Football', in France Football. In his youth, Camus kept goal for the Oran football club in  Algiers.

  • Two qualities essential for the artist: moralityand perspective.

    - Denis Diderot
    ^81 Pense  es de  tache e s sur la peinture.

  • Dr Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beefsteak.

    - Nathaniel Hawthorne
      Our Old Home.

  • As my poor father used to say In1863, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee!

    - SirA(lan) P(atrick) Herbert
      'Lines for a Worthy Person'.

  • Morality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep.

    -John Keats
      'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles'.

  • Si la morale de Cle  opa" t re e u" t e  te   moins courte, la face du monde aurait change  . Son nez n'en serait pas devenu plus long. If Cleopatra's morality had been less short, the face of the world would have been altered. Her nose would not thereby have grown longer.

    - Comte de properly Isidore Ducasse Lautre  amont
      Poe  sies, pt.2.

  • We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

    -1st Baron
      In the Edinburgh Review.

  • Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

    - H(enry) L(ouis) Mencken
      Prejudices.

  •    Moralit a« t ist Herden-Instinkt im Einzelnen. Morality is herd instinct in the individual.

    - FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche
      Die fro«  hliche Wissenschaft ( The Gay Science), section116 (translated by W Kaufmann).

  • Herren-Moral und Sklaven-Moral. Master morality and slave morality.

    - FriedrichWilhelm Nietzsche
      Jenseits von Gut und Bo«  se (Beyond Good and Evil), section 260 (translated by R  J Hollingdale).

  • Whatever isfunny issubversive, every joke isultimatelya custard pie† A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack uponmorality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

    - George pseudonym of  Eric Arthur Blair Orwell
      'The  Art of Donald McGill'.

  • La vraie e  loquence se moque de l'e  loquence, la vraie morale se moque de la morale. True eloquence has no time foreloquence, true morality has no time for morality.

    - Blaise Pascal
    c.1654^1662  Pense  es, no.4 (translated byA Krailsheimer).

  • Knowledge of physical science will not console me for ignorance of morality in time of affliction, but knowledge of morality will always console me for ignorance of physical science.

    - Blaise Pascal
    c.1654^1662  Pense  es, no.23.

  • Religion blushing veils her sacred fires, And unawares Morality expires.

    - Alexander Pope
      The Dunciad, bk.4, l.649^50.

  • Vous e"  tes libre, choisissez, c'est-a'  -dire, inventez. Aucune morale ge  ne  rale ne peut vous indiquer ce qu'il y a a' faire. You are free, therefore choosethat is to say, invent. No rule of general moralitycan show you what you ought to do.

    -Jean-Paul Sartre
      L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism and Humanism,1948) (translated by Philip Mairet).

  • Money is indeed the most important thing in the world: and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      The Irrational Knot, preface.

  • I'm one of theundeserving poor†up agen middle-class moralityall the time† What is middle-class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      Alfred Doolittle. Pygmalion, act 2.

  •    The so-called new morality is too often the old immorality condoned.

    - George Bernard Shaw
      In the Observer,17 Jul.

  • When someone says,'It isgood business', you may be sure it is bad morality.

    - Robin Skelton
    A Devious Dictionary.

  • The preservation of health is a duty.Few seem conscious that there is such a thing as physical morality.

    - Herbert Spencer
    Education, ch.4.

  • Morality is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger party.

    -Thrasymachus   5c
    Quoted in Plato Republic, 338b (translated by RobinWaterfield, 1993).

  • What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety.

    - Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain
      Quotedin AlbertBigelow Paine (ed) MarkTwain's Notebook (1935), ch.23.

  • What ismorality inany given time or place? It iswhat the majority thenand therehappento like, and immorality is what they dislike.

    - Alfred North Whitehead
      Conversation, 30 Aug. Collected in Dialogues (1954).

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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