Inspirational Quotes on Morality

“I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.”

“Let me give you a definition of ethics: It is good to maintain and further life it is bad to damage and destroy life.”

“Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will - his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.”

“Revenge... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.”

“The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.”

“Christianity is the only system of faith which combines religious beliefs with corresponding principles of morality. It builds ethics on religion.”

“I believe that a long step toward public morality will have been taken when sins are called by their right names.”

“You can't raise the standard of women's morals by raising their pay envelope. It lies deeper than that.”

“Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarrelled with him?”

“Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.”

“Vanity of science. 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.”

“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.”

“The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.”

“Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.”

“The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.”

“Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.”

“Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.”

“One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.”

“The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.”

“In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.”