Quotes About Virtue

There are heroes in evil as well as in good.

People who really try to be conscious of what they have done, who take responsibility, to me these kinds of people are heroes.

Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don't earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system.

It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that may be terribly misused.

Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence

Nobody can be a real princess--do not imagine you have yet been anything more than a mock one--until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it. So long as any mood she is in makes her do the thing she will be sorry for when that mood is over, she is a slave, and not a princess.

Knowlegde no doubt made bad people worse, but it must make good people better!

A candle is not lighted for itself; neither is a man. The light that serves self only, is no true light; its one virtue is that it will soon go out.

respectability to good impulses

To deny oneself is to act no more from the standing ground of self.... No longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart. Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what reception they may have, shall be our concern.

Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.

For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.

Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond.

Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of the truth.

It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine.

It was not, it could not be, in virtue of his humanity, it was in virtue of his childhood that this child was thus presented as representing a subject of the kingdom. It was not to show the scope but the nature of the kingdom. He told them they could not enter into the kingdom save by becoming little children-by humbling themselves.

Who obeys, shines.

There are a great many more good things than bad things to do.

Truly, if ignorance is the foundation of any man's goodness, it is not worth the wind that upsets it, but in its mere self, ignorance of evil is a negative good.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it? Money has become the grand test of virtue.

And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.

In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.