Quotes About Virtue

Happiness may be defined as good fortune joined to virtue, or a independence, or as a life that is both agreeable and secure.

A state is an association of similar persons whose aim is the best life possible. What is best is happiness, and to be happy is an active exercise of virtue and a complete employment of it.

Fear, logic, and tradition are not going to make you live a good life when no one is looking.

He who parades his virtues seldom leads the parade. He who puts up with insult invites injury. Health requires this relaxation, this aimless life. This life in the present.

He is not great who is not greatly good.

Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.

I was brought up to be honest; the trouble is it gets me nowhere." Liking her better, he smiled and said, "It'll get us to heaven." "Will it?" "If heaven existed." "Do you not believe in heaven, Mr. Fielding, may I ask?" she said, looking at him shyly. "I do not. Yet I believe that honesty gets us there.

For the barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. Or—to put the thing less cynically—we may be better in new clean words, which have never been tainted by our pettiness or vice.

Individual versus group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness, of virtue and sin, among the members of a society.

Rather, members of collectivist cultures make decisions based on the counsel of elders—parents, aunts or uncles. The highest goal and virtue in this sort of culture is supporting the community. This makes people happy (makarios).

It means, your worships' excellencies, that - you - can't come to it! This chicken won't fight. It means that the fat's in the fire, and the cat's out of the bag! It means confusion! Distraction! Perdition! And a tearing off of our wigs! It means the game's up, the play's over, villainy is about to be hanged and virtue about to be married, and the curtain is going to drop and the principal performer - that's I - is going to be called out amid the applause of the audience!

In this type of situation it soon becomes all too clear that in the eyes of the supporters of this sort of movement, there is only one sin, disloyalty to the Führer, or leader, and only one virtue, absolute obedience.

Fed by neither Heaven nor by Earth he was going forward . . . He hadn't a God or a lover--the two usual incentives to virtue. But on he struggled with his back to ease, because dignity demanded it. There was no one to watch him, nor did he watch himself, but struggles like his are the supreme achievements of humanity, and surpass any legends about Heavan.

Tolerance is a very dull virtue. It is boring. Unlike love, it has always had a bad press. It is negative. It merely means putting up with people, being able to stand things.

He hadn't a God, he hadn't a lover – the two usual incentives to virtue.

He had not the knack of surrounding himself with nice people--indeed, for a man of ability and virtue his choice had been singularly unfortunate; he had no guiding principle beyond a certain preference for mediocrity;

A man who is strong and tough never needs to show it in his dress or the way he cuts his hair. Toughness is a quality of the mind, like bravery or honesty or ambition; it has nothing whatever to do with muscles.

In a darkening world where the shadows of violence, political expediency, materialism and junk culture grow ever longer, sport as it is practised by its good pros remains a bastion of decency, a place where virtue is rewarded and cheating exposed.

Good is the natural state of things. Evil is the absence of good.

American idea is indeed in trouble. It should be. We have told ourselves a story that secures our virtue and protects us from our vices. But today we confront the ugliness of who we are—our darker angels reign.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

The time has arrived when patience becomes a crime and mayhem appears garbed in a manner of virtue

None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.