Quotes About Virtue

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

TAKING THE FIRST FOOTSTEP with a good thought, the second with a good word, and the third with a good deed, I entered paradise.

A society notorious for effacing the boundary which once separated the private from the public, for making it a public virtue and obligation to publicly expose the private, and for wiping away from public communication anything that resists being reduced to private confidences, together with those who refuse to confide them.

Being a good person is more than just not being a bad person.

See, when something's the right thing to do, you don't do it for a reward.

There are the times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman

the love of truth is an act of the spirit.

Right living is a way to right thinking.

one should always do the good, even though it is not done for its own sake.

You cannot have the right to do what is wrong!

While the people retain their virtue, and vigilance, no administration, by any extreme of wickedness or folly, can very seriously injure the government, in the short space of four years.

If I do good, I feel good...If I do bad, I feel bad

We surf the waves of capitalism, from crest to trough and back again, but the funny thing is that no matter how often we ride the wave, nobody notices that it's wet. When we are on the crest, we believe that we have climbed a mountain through our own virtuous efforts, and when we are in the trough, we believe that we have fallen into a pit through out own vice.

Virtue is excellence, something uncommonly great and beautiful, which rises far above what is vulgar and ordinary.

In the common degree of the moral, there is no virtue. Virtue is excellence.

I have always considered David Hume as approaching as nearly the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man as perhaps the nature of human frailty will allow.

To feel much for others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of human nature.

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

Pleasure and pain are the great objects of desire and aversion: but these are distinguished not by reason, but by immediate sense and feeling. If virtue, therefore, be desirable for its own sake, and if vice be, in the same manner, the object of aversion, it cannot be reason which originally distinguishes those different qualities, but immediate sense and feeling.

I know what you're thinking; you're thinking: it's an unjust world, and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances. Well you're not the Mikado and I'm not Mr Gilbert.

A cassock does not make a man a priest, any more than a fine dress makes a woman truly beautiful—or good or generous or intelligent. Don't confuse the way someone looks with the way they are. Grace is a rare thing.

In the last moments of his life Ciro realized that a truly good man is a rarity, a speck of gold in a mountain of slag.

ATHENA: You wish to be called righteous rather than act right. [...] I say, wrong must not win by technicalities.