moral

You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle.

—Stein, Gertrude

All reform except a moral one will prove unavailing.

—Carlyle,Thomas

The Victorians expected every building, like every painting, to tell a story, and preferably to point to a moral as well. 199

—Casson, Sir Hugh Maxwell

The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment.We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

—Havel,Va¤  clav

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

—Stevenson, Robert Louis

That it is at least as difficult to staya moral infection as a physical one; that such a disease will spread with the malignityand rapidity of the Plague; that the contagion, when it has once made head, will spare no pursuit or condition, but will lay hold on people in the soundest health, and become developed inthe most unlikely constitutions; is a fact as firmlyestablished by experience as that we human creatures breathe an atmosphere.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

I don't have a moral plan. I'm a Canadian.

—Cronenberg, David

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

—Shaw, George Bernard

Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.

—Dodgson

We sing the love of danger.Courage, rashness, and rebellion are the elements of our poetry. Hitherto literature has tended to exalt thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep, whereas we are for aggressive movement, febrile insomnia, mortal leaps, and blows with the fist.We proclaim that the world is richer for a new beautyof speed, and our praise isfor themanat the wheel. There is no beauty now save in struggle, no masterpiece can be anything but aggressive, and hence we glorify war, militarism and patriotism.

—Marinetti, Emilio FilippoTomasso

I suffer the anthropological malady diagnosed by Le¤  vi- Strauss inTristes tropiques: I find it much more difficult to suspend value judgments about the society in which I normally reside than I do abroad. It takes physical and cultural distance to gain moral detachment and political noncommitment. Relativism implies a solid measure of indifference.

—van den Berghe, Pierre L

The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetryadministers to the effect byacting on the cause.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

All books are the Book of Job, high moral tests and tasks set in fairy tales, landmined and unforgiving as golf greens, as steeplechase and gameboard and obstacle course. 310

—Elkin, Stanley Lawrence

Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet, His moral pleases, not his pointed wit.

—Pope, Alexander

The flute is not an instrument that has a good moral effectöit is too exciting.

—Aristotle

Why have women Passion, intellect, moral activityöthese threeöand a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?

—Nightingale, Florence

When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him; you must show him in the streets of the town; you must show him in the fair and the market place; and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely aloneöby putting him into a moral Coventry, by isolating himfromhiskindasif hewerea leperofold.You must show himyourdetestationofthe crimesthat hehas committed.

—Parnell, Charles Stewart

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art† The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.

—Dewey,John

But from the first 'twas Peter's drift To be a kind of moral eunuch, He touched the hem of Nature's shift, Felt faintöand never dared uplift The closest, all-concealing tunic.

—Shelley, Percy Bysshe

The League of Nations grows in moral courage. Its frown will soon be more dreaded than a nation's arms, and when that happens, you and I shall have securityand peace.

—Macdonald, (James) Ramsay

The Frenchhad a moremartial air thanthe English.There seemed to be a species of military instinct in all classes. No young man appeared to have finished his education till after a bloody campaign† They were at this singular period, without the least exaggeration, a century behind us in notions of legal and moral responsibility.

—Haydon, Benjamin Robert

Let us be moral.Let us contemplate existence.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

He was the type of man who was always trying to live beyond his moral means.

—Toynbee, (Theodore) Philip

A woman can look both moral and excitingöif she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.

—Ferber, Edna

Humanbeings, intheirgenerous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of a lower moral quality than their own.

—Hardy,Thomas

Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world's anguish is caused by people between twentyand forty.

—Faulkner,William Harrison

We want a society in which we are free to make choices, to make mistakes, to be generous and compassionate. That is what we mean by a moral societyönot a society in which the State is responsible for everything, and no one is responsible for the State.

—Thatcher, Margaret HildaThatcher, Baroness

Asthe strong man exults in his physical ability, delighting in such exercises as call his muscles into action, so glories the analyst in that moral activity which disentangles.

—Poe, EdgarAllan

A stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There could be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress.

—Mill,John Stuart

His moral character†was full of promise, but of no performance.

—Dickens, CharlesJohn Huffam

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

—Mailer, Norman Kingsley

The Labour Party is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.

—Wilson of Rievaulx, (James) Harold Wilson, Baron

Some kind of moral discovery should be the object of every tale.

—Connor, Sir William Neil pseudonym Cassandra

There is a growing division in our comparatively prosperous society between the South and the North and Midlands, which are ailing, that cannot be allowed to continue. There is a general sense of tension. The old English way might be to quarrel and have battles, but they were friendly. I can only describe as wicked the hatred that has been introduced, and which is to be found among different types of people today. Not merelyan intellectual but a moral effort isrequired toget rid of it.

—Stockton

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

—Wells, H(erbert) G(eorge)

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

—Twain, Mark pseudonym of  Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Notale everhappened intheway wetell it.Butthemoral is always correct.

—Barthelme, Donald

   About morals,I know only that what ismoral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

—Hemingway, Ernest Millar

  Sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. Theyare pure expressions of feeling and as such donot come under the categoryof truth and falsehood.

—Ayer, SirAlfred Jules

Zwei Dinge erfu«  llen das Gemu« t  mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je  o« fter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit besch a« ftigt: der bestirnte Himmel u«  ber mir, unddas moralische Gesetz in mir. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within.

—Kant, Immanuel

   The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

The government and the people are under a moral necessity of acting together; a free press compels them to bend to one another.

—Mill,James

The moral of all this†is that we have the kind of advertising we deserve.

—Sayers, Dorothy L(eigh)

On devient moral de'  s qu'on est malheureux. We become moral once we are miserable.

—Proust, Marcel

Wordsworth says somewhere that wherever Virgil seems to have composed 'with his eye on the object', Dryden fails to render him. Homer invariably composes 'with his eye onthe object', whether the object be moral or a material one: Pope composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.

—Arnold, Matthew

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

—Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills

   There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joyand that it is this which will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.

—Walker, Alice Malsenior

All the immediate checks to populationöseem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.

—Malthus,Thomas Robert

No one can be perfectly free until all are free; no one can be perfectly moral till all are moral; no one can be perfectly happy till all are happy.

—Spencer, Herbert

There isno suchthing as a moral dress† It's people who are moral or immoral.

—Churchill,Jeanette ne¤  e Jeanette Jerome

In our country the lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State.

—Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science† When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed.

—Dewey,John

The economic services that it can render are picayune compared to the moral effect that it produces, and its true function is to create in two or more persons a feeling of solidarity.

—Durkheim, EŁ  mile

The quality of moral behaviour varies in inverse ratio to the number of human beings involved.

—Huxley, Aldous Leonard

There was a time when the average reader read a novel simply for the moral he could get out of it, and however na|«ve that may have been, it was a good deal less na|«ve than some of the limited objectives he has now.

—O'Connor, (Mary) Flannery

The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

—Ignatieff, Michael

A story with a moral appended is like the bite of a mosquito. It bores you, and then injects a stinging drop to irritate your conscience.

—O Henry pseudonym of  William Sydney Porter

   The threat to morale comes not from the orientation of a few, but from the closed minds of the many.

—Robb, Charles S(pittal)

A man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

—Shaw, George Bernard