Best Morality Quotes to Inspire, Uplift & Motivate You Every Day

“I find my thoughts, increasingly, not on the supernatural or spiritual but on what is meant by living a good and worthwhile life—achieving a sense of peace within oneself.”

“One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting.”

“The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion. It has been the most dishonourable belief against the character of the divinity, the most destructive to morality, and the peace and happiness of man, that ever was propagated since man began to exist. It is better, far better, that we admitted, if it were possible, a thousand devils to roam at large, and to preach publicly the doctrine of devils, if there were any such, than that we permitted one such impostor and monster as Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and the Bible prophets, to come with the pretended word of God in his mouth, and have credit among us.”

“You ask 'Are you a man or a demon?' Neither, I say. I have woken up, and the rest of you are sleeping, and that is the only difference between us.”

“The night before brain surgery, I thought about death. I searched out my larger values, and I asked myself, if I was going to die, did I want to do it fighting and clawing or in peaceful surrender? What sort of character did I hope to show? Was I content with myself and what I had done with my life so far? I decided that I was essentially a good person, although I could have been better--but at the same time I understood that the cancer didn't care.”

“The death of dogma is the birth of morality.”

“Some people don't apply a stop loss, so there's no limit to how far their character can fall.”

“Manon," said the hunchback gravely, "it's your thoughts that are nasty. This gentleman gave us the tiles we were missing, so every time it rains we should recognize it and give him a little thanks.”

“Morality is just a fiction used by the herd of inferior human beings to hold back the few superior men.”

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing”

“Ultimate prosperity is one's value within. It takes a man of depth, morality, and charm to be envied yet without a sign of wealth or romance. A passion to prove such inner worth is his permission to achieve whatever he desires.”

“You can't be spontaneous within reason.”

“It would be well to realize that the talk of ‘humane methods of warfare’, of the ‘rules of civilized warfare’, and all such homage to the finer sentiments of the race are hypocritical and unreal, and only intended for the consumption of stay-at-homes. There are no humane methods of warfare, there is no such thing as civilized warfare; all warfare is inhuman, all warfare is barbaric; the first blast of the bugles of war ever sounds for the time being the funeral knell of human progress… What lover of humanity can view with anything but horror the prospect of this ruthless destruction of human life. Yet this is war: war for which all the jingoes are howling, war to which all the hopes of the world are being sacrificed, war to which a mad ruling class would plunge a mad world.”

“If something is wrong, it matters not if a thousand men are for it; you must still oppose it. If something is just, no amount of popular outcry should stay you from your course.”

“To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.”

“My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with telling the truth. I know it isn’t fashionable.”

“Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.”

“Never do anything that you can't admit doing, because if you are that ashamed of whatever it is, it's probably wrong.”

“I understand more that pain is evidence to our awakening to truth and also a measure of closeness to truth.”

“...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might.”

“Don’t you understand? When you’re standing on their side, you’re the bizarre genius, the miraculous hero, the force of the rebellion, the flower that blooms alone. But the second your voice differs from theirs, you’ve lost your mind, you’ve ignored morality, you’ve walked the crooked path.”

“Wisdom begins not in knowing answers, but in knowing what must be asked.”

“I've been thinking a lot about what we lost when we lost Kurt Vonnegut, and the main thing that keeps coming to mind is that we lost a moral voice. We lost a very reasonable and credible--though not to say staid or toothless--voice who helped us know how to live.”

“The oldest sin is certainty. The second oldest is enforcing it.”

“Nothing is as fragile as a system built on obedience. One frightened whisper can topple it.”

“Reason can justify the most evil act as it condemns the most noble one.”

“If you boil it down, just because someone else does the wrong thing we are not exempt from doing what’s right.”

“... what you think is right isn't the same as knowing what is right.”

“In 1881, being on a visit to Boston, my wife and I found ourselves in the Parker House with the”