Quotes About Virtue

So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.

There is no virtue [in] America. That commerce which preside[d over] the birth and education of these states has [fitted] their inhabitants for the chain and . . . the only condition they sincerely desire is that it may be a golden one.

I don't see any harm myself in making a little money, provided that it can be done honestly and reasonably.

perhaps he had so thoroughly rationalized his own behavior that he saw himself in the same glowing, virtuous light as his son did.

As to the love of liberty and country, you have given no stronger proofs of being actuated by it than I have done. Cease then to arrogate to yourself and to your party all the patriotism and virtue of the country."70

he was an unusually sober and purposeful young man. In countless letters in later years, he advised young relatives that adolescence was a risky time when evil influences lurked nearby, ready to pounce: "You are now extending into that stage of life when good or bad habits are formed. When the mind will be turned to things useful and praiseworthy or to dissipation and vice.

The Mohawk was in there, plus a couple of others that made the Mohawk look a model of probity. A

try to do the right thing. Even though everybody hates us and nobody helps us and nobody thanks us afterward. I think doing the right thing is an end in itself. It has to be, really, doesn't it?

Certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be.

We see them reporting the words and actions of a man who called them to as exacting a level of integrity as any religion has ever known. They were willing to live out their beliefs even to the point of ten of the eleven remaining disciples being put to grisly deaths, which shows great character. "In terms of honesty, in terms of truthfulness, in terms of virtue and morality, these people had a track record that should be envied.

They only throw clean ones

The end of learning, he said, is to "repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him" by acquiring "true virtue" (Hughes 631). This reinforces and expands Sidney's point that the end of learning is virtuous action.

German idealism is a return to the premodern on an 'English' and therefore insufficient basis... the German idealistic concept of freedom is a synthesis of the premodern concept of virtue with the Hobbesian-Lockean concept of subjective right as the morally fundamental fact.

Art is justice"—this proposition reflects the Socratic assertion that virtue is knowledge.

The final allegation of the accuser states that Socrates made a mischievous use of certain passages in the most highly reputed poets, interpreting, for example, a line from Hesiod to mean that one should abstain from no unjust or shameful deed but do even such things for the sake of gain. Xenophon's response speaks of Socrates' standard as the beneficial or the good; it says nothing about his views on the noble and just.

Its status is rather like that of a painting of a perfectly beautiful human being, i.e., it is only by virtue of the painter's painting; more precisely, the just city is only "in speech": it "is" only by virtue of having been figured out with a view to justice itself or to what is by nature right on the one hand and the human all-too-human on the other.

Glaukon makes the issue manifest by comparing the perfectly unjust man to the perfect artisan, whereas he conceives of the perfectly just man as a simple man who has no quality other than justice.

In a primacy-of-consciousness philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to the ruling consciousness, such as God or society. In Ayn Rand's philosophy, virtue consists of allegiance to existence; it consists of a man's recognizing facts and then acting accordingly.

In an objective approach, force and value are opposites. The goal of a proper society, accordingly, is not to compel truth or virtue (which would be a contradiction in terms), but to make them possible—by ensuring that men are left free.

sooner will there exist a body without a shadow than virtue unaccompanied by envy.

That which can be lost cannot be deemed riches. Virtue is our true wealth and the true reward of its possessor; it cannot be lost, it never deserts us until life leaves us. Hold property and external riches with fear; they often leave their possessor scorned and mocked at for having lost them.

Chi semina virtù fama raccoglie.

Non appena nasce la virtù, nasce contro di lei l'invidia, e farà prima il corpo a perdere la sua ombra che la virtù la sua invidia.

Who sows virtue reaps honour.