Civilisation depends on morality. [ Ralph Waldo Emerson ]

The laws of morality are also those of art. [ Schumann ]

To deny the freedom of the will is to make morality impossible. [ Froude ]

A higher morality, like a higher intelligence, must be reached by a slow growth. [ Herbert Spencer ]

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt toward people whom we personally dislike. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Enjoy and give enjoyment, without injury to thyself or to others: this is true morality. [ Chamfort ]

Representative government is justice organised, reason in living action, and morality armed. [ Royer Collard ]

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram. [ Whipple ]

We like morality when we are old, because we make of it a merit for the numerous privations which have become for us a necessity. [ Mme. de Salm ]

Proverbs were anterior to books, and formed the wisdom of the vulgar, and in the earliest ages were the unwritten laws of morality. [ Disraeli ]

The truly strong mind, view it as intellect or morality, or under any other aspect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its strength. [ Carlyle ]

I am not aware that payment, or even favors, however gracious, bind any man's soul and conscience in questions of highest morality and highest importance. [ Charles Kingsley ]

One could not wish any man to fall into a fault; yet it is often precisely after a fault, or a crime even, that the morality which is in a man first unfolds itself, and what of strength he as a man possesses, now when all else is gone from him. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The Bible contains more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, more pure morality, more important history, and finer strains of poetry and eloquence than can be collected from all other books, in whatever age or language they have been written. [ Sir William Jones ]

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down to the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the common sense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit. [ Edwin Percy Whipple ]

History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality. A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain. There is nothing in the world as unbecoming to a woman as a Nonconformist conscience. [ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere's Fan ]

It may be too much to expect that nations should be governed in their relations towards each other by the precepts of Christian morality, but surely it is not too much to ask that they should conform to the code of courtesy and good breeding recognized among gentlemen in the intercourse of social life. [ Geo. S. Hillard ]

Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others is a just criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, is a criterion of iniquity. One should not quarrel with a dog without a reason sufficient to vindicate one through all the courts of morality. [ Goldsmith ]

Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite. [ Victor Cousin ]

Good taste is essentially a moral quality. Taste is not only a part and an index of morality — it is the only morality. The first, last, and closest trial question to any living creature is, What do you like? - and the entire object of true education is to make people not merely do right things, but enjoy the right things. What we like determines what we are, and is the sign of what we are; and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. [ Ruskin ]

Men cannot labor on always. They must have intervals of relaxation. They cannot sleep through these interTafs. What are they to do? Why, if they do not work or sleep, they must have recreation. And if they have not recreation from healthful sources, they will be very likely to take it from the poisoned fountains of intemperance. Or, if they have pleasures, which, though innocent, are forbidden by the maxims of public morality, their very pleasures are liable to become poisoned fountains. [ Orville Dewey ]