Quotes About Virtue

If Beauty called it didn't stay, & Virtue looked the other way. Another charge that I will file: your habits, like your looks, are vile.

Be good, my dears, and if you can't be good don't do it in front of witnesses!

Very few politicians, who have chosen a political career, can fulfill the aspirations and survive the strains of an elevated office that in a monarchy was filled so randomly. Each tsar had to be simultaneously dictator and supreme general, high priest and Little Father. They required all the qualities listed by the sociologist Max Weber: the personal gift of grace, the virtue of legality, and "the authority of the eternal yesterday.

In the intellectual order, the virtue of humility is nothing more nor less than the power of attention.

Il principale fondamento della moralità dell'individuo e di un popolo e la stima costante e profonda che esso ha di sé e la cura che ha a conservarsela, la sensibilità sul proprio onore. Un uomo senza amor proprio non può essere giusto, onesto e virtuoso.

It is hard to be truly excellent, four-square in hand and foot and mind, formed without blemish.

Doing the right thing is actually the right thing to do.

Never leave honor to chance

Do right things and the time will also be right.

Do what's right while the sun still shines.

Next to the humble man, we find wisdom.

The good attracts the good.

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed: for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, even if religion vanished; but religious superstition dismounts all these and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men.

Atheism leads a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation: all of which may be guides to an outward moral virtue. (c. 1625)

No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic.

Virtue is its own reward. There's a pleasure in doing good which sufficiently pays itself.

Men are not to be judged by their looks, habits, and appearances, but by the character of their lives and conversations. ?Tis better that a man?s own works than another man?s words should praise him.

To be nameless in worthy deeds exceeds an infamous history.

There is no road or ready way to virtue.

There is nothing more becoming a wise man than to make choice of friends, for by them thou shalt be judged what thou art. Let them therefore be wise and virtuous, and none of those that follow thee for gain; but make election rather of thy betters than thy inferiors; shunning always such as are poor and needy, for if thou givest twenty gifts and refuse to do the like but once, all that thou hast done will be lost, and such men will become thy mortal enemies.

You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.