Morality Quotes

A person must have a good memory to keep the promises he has made. A person must have a strong imagination to be able to have pity. So closely is morality tied to the quality of the intellect.

Socrates.- If all goes well, the time will come when one will take up the memorabilia of Socrates rather than the Bible as a guide to morals and reason... Socrates excels the founder of Christianity in being able to be serious cheerfully and in possessing that wisdom full of roguishness that constitutes the finest state of the human soul. And he also possessed the finer intellect.

The doctrine of equality! ... But there is no more venomous poison in existence: for it appears to be preached by justice itself, when it is actually the end of justice ... "Equality to the equal; inequality to the unequal" that would be true justice speaking: and its corollary, "never make the unequal equal".

There is such a thing as a hatred of lies and dissimulation, which is the outcome of a delicate sense of humor; there is also the selfsame hatred but as the result of cowardice, in so far as falsehood is forbidden by Divine law. Too cowardly to lie.

To be natural means to dare to be as immoral as Nature is.

For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but intervening shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.

Anything which is a living and not a dying body... will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant-not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power... 'Exploitation'... belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which is after all the will to life.

The preponderance of pain over pleasure is the cause of our fictitious morality and religion.

Noble and wise men once believed in the music of the spheres: noble and wise men still continue to believe in the "moral significance of existence." But one day even this sphere-music will no longer be audible to them! They will wake up and take note that their ears were dreaming.

Who is the most moral man? First, he who obeys the law most frequently, who ... is continually inventive in creating opportunities for obeying the law. Then, he who obeys it even in the most difficult cases. The most moral man is he who sacrifices the most to custom.

Whoever has overthrown an existing law of custom has hitherto always first been accounted a bad man: but when, as did happen, the law could not afterwards be reinstated, and this fact was accepted, the predicate gradually changed. History treats almost exclusively of these bad men who subsequently became good men!

There still shines the most important nuance by virtue of which the noble felt themselves to be men of a higher rank. They designate themselves simply by their superiority in power or by the most clearly visible signs of this superiority, for example, as the rich, the possessors.

While every noble morality develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself, slave morality from the outset says no to what is outside, what is different, what is not itself; and this No is its creative deed.

When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. For the latter is absolutely not self-evident: one must make this point clear again and again, in spite of English shallowpates.

This sign I give you: every people speaks its tongue of good and evil, which the neighbor does not understand. It has invented its own language of customs and rights.

Their usual mistaken premise is that they affirm some consensus among people, at least among tame peoples, concerning certain moral principles, and then conclude that these principles must be unconditionally binding also for you and me-or conversely, they see that among different peoples moral valuations are necessarily different and infer from this that no morality is binding-both of which are equally childish.

The noble man does not sin, the profound poet wishes to tell us: through his actions every law, every natural order, the whole moral world can be destroyed, and through the actions a higher magic circle of effects is drawn, founding a new world on the ruin of the old, now destroyed.

We must always walk in the presence of the Lord, in the light of the Lord, always trying to live in an irreprehensible way.

Sin, also for those who don't have faith, exists when one goes against one's conscience. To listen to and obey it means, in fact, to decide in face of what is perceived as good or evil. And on this decision pivots the goodness or malice of our action.

We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it. We have had enough of immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty. It is time to acknowledge that light-hearted superficiality has done us no good.