Quotes About Virtue

there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.

You do the right thing even if it makes you feel bad. The purpose of life is not to be happy but to be worthy of happiness.

Life holds only one tragedy, ultimately: not to have been a saint.

My grandma would quote Abraham Lincoln all the time: "Whatever you do in life, be a good one."

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.

I persist on praising not the life I lead, but that which I ought to lead. I follow it at a mighty distance, crawling

Neither a life of anarchy nor a life under a despot should you praise. To all that lies in the middle has a god given excellence.

Gluttony and idleness are two of life's great joys, but they are not honourable.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.

Virtue is its own punishment.

There is nothing more vulgar than a petty bourgeois life with its halfpence, its victuals, its futile talk, and its useless conventional virtue.

Be humble like Mary so that you can be holy like Jesus

You don't become a saint until you lead a good life whether in Tibet or Italy or America.

Be superior to pleasure.

The greatest ornament of an illustrious life is modesty and humility, which go a great way in the character even of the most exalted princes.

But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn't dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

But the truth is she has good impulse control. That is why she isn't dead. Also why she became a writer instead of a heroin addict. She thinks before she acts. Or more properly, she thinks instead of acts. A character flaw, not a virtue.

But godliness with contentment is great gain' (v.6)—there is the glory and excellence of it; as if to suggest that godliness were not gain except contentment be with it.

Now carnal hearts do not find that power in the Word, that healing virtue that is in it, to heal their distracting cares, and the troubles of their spirits; but when those who are godly come to hear the Word, they find in it, as it were, a plaster for all their wounds, and so they come to have ease and contentment in such conditions as are very grievous and miserable to others.

Conduciveness to happiness being then the test of virtue, and all happiness being composed of our own happiness and that of others, the production of our own happiness is prudence, the production of the happiness of others is effective benevolence. The tree of virtue is thus divided into to great stems, out of which grow all the other branches of virtue.

Kings are (nay were before they were Kings, since it was this qualification determined their subjects to make them Kings) as strong as so many Hercules's; but then, as to their wisdom, or their goodness, there is not much to say.

So long as idleness is quite shut out from our lives, all the sins of wantonness, softness, and effeminacy are prevented; and there is but little room for temptation.