Quotes About Virtue

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.

Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.

It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.

Happiness is prosperity combined with virtue.

Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.

With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it.

Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses or avoids

No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.

One can aim at honor both as one ought, and more than one ought, and less than one ought. He whose craving for honor is excessive is said to be ambitious, and he who is deficient in this respect unambitious; while he who observes the mean has no peculiar name.

Men are good in but one way, but bad in many.

We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

He who takes his fill of every pleasure ... becomes depraved; while he who avoids all pleasures alike ... becomes insensible.

Both excess and defect are alike prejudicial to moral virtue.

It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

Justice is the fundamental virtue of political society, since the order of society cannot be maintained without law, and laws are instituted to declare what is just.

Purpose ... is held to be most closely connected with virtue, and to be a better token of our character than are even our acts.

Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

Man is armed with craft and courage, which, untamed by justice, he will most wickedly pervert, and become at once the most impious and the fiercest of monsters.

Happiness is a thing which calls for honor rather than for praise.