Quotes About Virtue

There is no hatred on earth like that for someone who possesses a virtue you do not have, or want. It is the mirror that shows you what you are, and obliges you to see it.

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

There's a virtue,' Felix said, 'to listening to a reluctant storyteller. You know that he is in fact diving deep for the salvageable truth.

everything a man does is part of the moral fabric of who he is, and what he is.

We can have ethics and we can have honor and we can have loyalty," he insisted, "and every other key virtue we learned as humans." He was roaring at me under his breath, as the British so often do it, with a veneer of silvery politeness.

Oh, not goodness again," he said. "You and your malady of mortality, and your malady of goodness.

One shouldn't lust after an innocent.

Ako nekoga mrzi mnogo ljudi, to mora da je dobar ?ovek.

If honor be your clothing, the suit will last a lifetime. —William Arnot

Cultivate the good. One can cultivate the good. If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. If this cultivation were to bring harm and suffering, I would not ask you to do it. But as this cultivation brings benefit and happiness, I say, cultivate the good.

W]hen we kill people,' a British sea-captain says in the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh's Sea of Poppies, 'we feel compelled to pretend that it is for some higher cause. It is this pretence of virtue, I promise you, that will never be forgiven by history.' I cannot presume to write on behalf of history, but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.

lack of preference is itself a preference. To put the true leaders of the people on the same level as princes and pretenders and pimps is not virtuous but vicious.

Davis told him, and went on to suggest that necessity be made a virtue and a source of strength.

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists—starting with Plato's Republic—have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power.

he "rules" with a kind of Gaullist grandeur, testing the constitutional limits of office, while pursuing a politics of "daring, sacrifice," and "nobility."30 Above all, ideally the executive stands not for programs but for "virtue." That means, among other things, he is prepared to act in defiance of the popular will.

It is not possible to sin enough to be happy. It isn't possible to buy enough to be happy, or to entertain or indulge or pamper ourselves enough to be happy. It is not possible to hide enough or run far enough away from trials and troubles to be happy. Happiness and joy come only when we are living up to who we are... I have never met anyone who was happier because he was immoral, or because he was addicted to something, or because he was dishonest and compromised his integrity.

Patience is a virtue. (Tee) Excuse me, pot, could you not pick on the kettle? (Joe)

Leaders who have integrity possess one of the most respected virtues in all of life.

Good character is the single most important attribute of a successful and worthy life.

Now, of all the benefits that virtue confers upon us, the contempt of death is one of the greatest.

Bien predica quien bien vive. He preaches well who lives well.

The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct.

In my own case, who have spent my whole life in the practice of virtue, right conduct from habitual has become natural.

Little would be wanting to the happiness of life, if every man could conform to the right as soon as he was shown it.