Quotes About Virtue

When you're not a good man yourself you respect a good man. Now I'd prefer to die with a good man around. A good man teaches a lot of nonsense and a bad man teaches truth [...] I'm not the one to teach the boy nonsense.

Quizá el sentido de la moral es la triste compensación que aprendemos a valorar como premio por la buena conducta.

But jealousy, distrust, cruelty, revenge, recrimination … then we fail. The wrong is in that failure even if we are the victims and not the executioners. Virtue is no excuse.

I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity

Men of integrity and courage are rare these days.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. —Aristotle

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

Every virtuous act has some Dark secret in its heart; every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.

Motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

honour is the art of being humble.

it's a very hard thing to resist, real goodness, in a tough man.

It was] a beauty that sours if it isn't nourished by some goodness within.

We can compel men not to be bad, but we cannot compel them to be good, don't you find?

She'd confused honour with virtue. Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honorable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honor at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble. And gangsters, just like cops, politicians, soldiers, and holy men, are only ever good at what they do if they stay humble.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You can fight a war in an honourable way—the Geneva Convention exists for that very reason—and you can enforce the peace without any honour at all. In its essence, honour is the art of being humble.

Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it.

if we envy someone for all the right reasons, we're half way to wisdom.

Khaderbhai once said that every virtuous act is inspired by a dark secret. It mightn't be true of everyone, but it was true enough about me. The little good that I've done in the world has always dragged behind it a shadow of dark inspiration... ...When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us. But then, when salvation speaks, the secrets we kept, and the motives we concealed, creep from their shadows.

The truth is there are no good men or bad men. It is the deeds that have goodness or badness in them. There are good deeds, and bad deeds. Men are just men - it is what they do, or refuse to do, that links them to good or evil.

Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. You

Every virtuous act has some dark secret in its heart, Khaderbhai once told me, and every risk we take contains a mystery that can't be solved.