If your morals make you dreary, depend upon it they are wrong. I do not say "give them up," for they may be all you have; but conceal them like a vice, lest they should spoil the lives of better and simpler people.

For those who do not guard their morals,
Prayers are but wishful thinking.
For those who do not practice what they preach,
Oratory is but faithless lying.

Don't be so blinded by your morals you fail to do what's right.

A man should not be without morals; it is better to have bad morals than none at all.

Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.

I know what good morals are,
but you're supposed to disregard good morals when you're living in a crazy, bad world. If you're in hell, how can you live like an angel? You're surrounded by devils,trying to be an angel? That's like suicide.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.

They who no longer believe in principles still proclaim them, to conceal, both from themselves and others, the selfishness of the motives by which they are dominated.

it is just as wrong, or even perhaps more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

"To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness — that is, when we do these things in private. But when they are done in communion with others they satisfy nature and may even count as useful virtues. It is only restraint practised in and for oneself that is unwholesome. It is as if man had an inalienable right to behold all that is dark, imperfect, stupid and guilty in his fellow-beings — for such of course are the things that we keep private to protect ourselves. It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency — just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession — a significance known in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: "Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.

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. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness lost their depth and dimension, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous in the era of computers and spaceships.

But the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is — religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist morals, hippie morals — they're all the same. The moral codes change but the meanness and the egotism stay the same.