Quotes About Virtue

Beauty is a symbol of goodness; the admiration we feel for it is a symbol of the reverence inspired by the moral law.

Her instinct was always to act out of kindness and generosity instead of self-interest. She was a better person than me, and I was a better person when I was around her.

I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.

Only that which makes you feel bad after doing is immoral.

There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow men. True nobility is being superior to your former self.

There is no defect without its own virtue and vice versa.

Misuse of power, possessed by virtue of state law and made possible only because the wrongdoer is clothed with the authority of state law, is action taken 'under color of' state law."19

Princes may make laws and repeal them, but they can neither make nor destroy virtue, and how indeed should they be able to do what is impossible to the Deity himself? Virtue being as immutable in its nature as the divine will which is the ground of it.

Virtue and vice are the only things in this world, which, with our souls, are capable of surviving death; the former is the rational and only procuring cause of all intellectual happiness, and the latter of conscious guilt and misery; and therefore, our indispensable duty and ultimate interest is, to love, cultivate and improve the one, as the means of our greatest good, and to hate and abstain from the other, as productive of our greatest evil.

1. An 'unit' is that by virtue of which each of the things that exist is called one. 2. A 'number' is a multiple composed of units.

'Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain't no flies on me,But jest 'fore Christmas I'm as good as I kin be!

The congregation is the pastor's place for developing vocational holiness. It goes without saying that it is the place of ministry: we preach the word and administer the sacraments, we give pastoral care and administer the community life, we teach and we give spiritual direction. But it is also the place in which we develop virtue, learn to love, advance in hope — become what we preach.

The temptations that use the raw material of good for evil can continue unrecognized for a long time without awareness.

The mouth of a good person is a deep, life-giving well, but the mouth of the wicked is a dark cave of abuse.

Pride first, then the crash, but humility is precursor to honor.

There is a great market for religious experience in our world; there is little enthusiasm for the patient acquisition of virtue, little inclination to sign up for a long apprenticeship in what earlier generations of Christians called holiness.

realized that consistency, a trait I had long esteemed, was sometimes not such a virtue after all.

Jesus] said "Follow me" and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn't after the best but the worst.

I would prefer as friend a good man ignorant than one more clever who is evil too.

The good and the wise lead quiet lives.

In goodness there are all kinds of wisdom.

For the good, when praised, feel something of disgust, if to excess commended.

We know the good, we apprehend it clearly,but we can't bring it to achievement.