Quotes About Virtue

Lay siege to your sins, and starve them out by keeping away the food and fuel which is their maintenance and life.

what a silly, frail, and forward pieces are the best of men (647)!

Desire a thousand times more to be godly, than to seem so.

Be just before you're generous.

LADY SNEERWELL. I'm not disappointed in Snake, I never suspected the fellow to have virtue enough to be faithful even to his own Villany.

Integrity is the essence of everything successful.

Every year of my life I grow more convinced that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and the good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false.

We ought not to judge of men's merits by their qualifications, but by the use they make of them.

More generally, as I shall repeat in Chapter 8, one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding.

In Western tradition, white is beautiful because it is the colour of virtue. This remarkable equation relates to a particular definition of goodness. All lists of the moral connotations of white as symbol in Western culture are the same: purity, spirituality, transcendence, cleanliness, virtue, simplicity, chastity. In

Virtue was vanity dressed up and waiting for applause.

You're only good if you can do bad and decide not to.

Worthy character is best forged from a life of consistent, correct choices centered in the teachings of the Master.

Paul wisely taught, 'Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.' [Rom. 12:21]

Strong moral character results from consistent correct choices in the trials and testing of life. Your faith can guide you to those correct choices.

You cannot be passive in life, or in time the natural man will undermine your efforts to live worthily. You become what you do and what you think about. Lack of character leads one under pressure to satisfy appetite or seek personal gain. You cannot successfully bolster a weak character with the cloak of pretense.

We become what we want to be by consistently being what we want to become each day. Righteous character is a precious manifestation of what you are becoming. Righteous character is more valuable than any material object you own, any knowledge you have gained through study, or any goals you have attained no matter how well lauded by mankind.

My principles wouldn't allow it.

Yet Conscience is a nobleman, the best in us, and a friend.

Not that it was unjust; not that the scales were forced out of balance. Where there had been good, it showed as clearly. Kindnesses, accomplishments, all those were present, too.

If such as Thomas a Kempis and Bernard of Clairvaux are generous providers of the occasion of education, rather than reciters of precepts and beliefs, it is because they are seeking to be virtuous and to compose their own lives, rather than worrying that others might be vicious, leading discordant lives. Such teachers do the best that a teacher can do. In their own deliberations, they cast enough light that I may see something by it, if I happen to be looking.

Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.

Since I don't smoke or drink or swear unconvincingly, symmetry is my only vice.

Generosity is meaningless to a god, who never suffers shortage or want; courage is meaningless to a god, who is immortal and can never suffer permanent injury, and so on. Our virtues and our dignity arise from our mortality, our humanity—and not from any success in being God.