Quotes About Virtue

If your heart is pure, you block any harm.

A man does not have to be an angel to be a saint.

If character is what you do when no one is watching, then sportsmanship is that conduct with everybody watching.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation.

Heroes are not known by the loftiness of their carriage; the greatest braggarts are generally the merest cowards.

If you lose your integrity, you've lost everything.

Character is what you do when no one is watching.

If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don't have integrity, nothing else matters.

A mode of thought does not become 'critical' simply by attributing that label to itself, but by virtue of its content.

For Kant one can be both good and stupid; but for Aristotle stupidity of a certain kind precludes goodness.

Kant was right; morality did in the eighteenth century, as a matter of historical fact, presuppose something very like the teleological scheme of God, freedom and happiness as the final crown of virtue which Kant propounds. Detach morality from that framework and you will no longer have morality; or, at the very least, you will have radically transformed its character.

unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately.

Always do what's right; this will gratify some and astonish the rest

As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.

Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.

It is abhorrent to me when a fine intelligence is paired with an unsavory character

And that, put in the Director sententiously, that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.

Those who meant well behaved in the same way as those who meant badly.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief. The lords prayer is less than 50 words long, and 6 of those words are devoted to asking god not to lead us into temptation.

Those who crusade not for God in themselves but against the devil in others, never succeed in leaving the world better, but leave it as it was or sometimes even perceptibly worse than it was before the crusade began.

Half at least of all morality is negative and consists in keeping out of mischief.

The most nearly free men have always been those who combined virtue with insight.

Contemplatives are not likely to become gamblers, or procurers, or drunkards; they do not as a rule preach intolerance, or make war; do not find it necessary to rob, swindle or grind the faces of the poor.

I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue.