You don't read Gatsby, I said, to learn whether adultery is good or bad but to learn about how complicated issues such as adultery and fidelity and marriage are. A great novel heightens your senses and sensitivity to the complexities of life and of individuals, and prevents you from the self-righteousness that sees morality in fixed formulas about good and evil.
Taste is not only a part and index of morality, it is the only morality. The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature is "What do you like?" Tell me what you like, I'll tell you what you are.
There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
By a peculiar prerogative, not only each individual is making daily advances in the sciences, and may makes advances in morality, but all mankind together are making a continual progress in proportion as the universe grows older; so that the whole human race, during the course of so many ages, may be considered as one man, who never ceases to live and learn.
All my businesses are scrupulously legal. Not because I have any moral problems with crime. It just makes my life easier to obey the law. Crime is for poor people; you don't need to rob the bank if you own it.
Everything has got a moral if you can only find it.
If the weak hand, that has recorded this tale, has, by its scenes, beguiled the mourner of one hour of sorrow, or, by its moral, taught him to sustain it - the effort, however humble, has not been vain, nor is the writer unrewarded.
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." [Moral Decay (first published 1937)]
Golf may be played on Sunday, not being a game within the view of the law, but being a form of moral effort.
Just as animal research tells us that gluttony and sloth are side effects of a drive to accumulate body fat, it also says that eating in moderation and being physically active (literally, having the energy to exercise) are not evidence of moral rectitude. Rather, they're the metabolic benefits of a body that's programmed to remain lean.