Quotes About Virtue

My errors are by now natural and incorrigible; but the good that worthy men do the public by making themselves imitable, I shall perhaps do by making myself evitable.

The confidence in another man's virtue is no light evidence of a man's own, and God willingly favors such a confidence.

There is no fair in life and death. If it were, no good men would die young.

Public esteem is the recompense of honest men.

A man without nobility cannot have kindliness; he can only have good nature.

How many honest men do you know? Take the sinners away from the saints, you're lucky to end up with Abraham Lincoln.

There is no man suddenly either excellently good or extremely evil, but grows either as he holds himself up in virtue or lets himself slide to viciousness.

Fearfulness, contrary to all other vices, maketh a man think the better of another, the worse of himself.

May I deem the wise man rich, and may I have such a portion of gold as none but a prudent man can either bear or employ.

Modesty becomes a young man. [Lat., Adolescentem verecundum esse decet.]

It well becomes a young man to be modest.

Cato requested old men not to add the disgrace of wickedness to old age, which was accompanied with many other evils.

Spintharus, speaking in commendation of Epaminondas, says he scarce ever met with any man who knew more and spoke less.

The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought to govern who is not better than the governed.

A man is sorry to be honest for nothing.

There is a good ear, in some men, that draws supplies to virtue out of very indifferent nutriment.

I think no virtue goes with size;The reason of all cowardiceIs, that men are overgrown,And, to be valiant, must come downTo the titmouse dimension.

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome.

Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.

A prince can mak a belted knight, A marquis, duke, and a' that; But an honest man's aboon his might: Guid faith, he maunna fa' that.

Profane swearing never did any man any good. No man in the richer or wiser or happier for it.

The common people do not judge of vice or virtue by morality or immorality, so much as by the stamp that is set upon it by men of figure.

Considering how bad men are, it is wonderful how well they behave.

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.