Quotes About Virtue

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

The round of a passionate man's life is in contracting debts in his passion, which his virtue obliges him to pay. He spends his time in outrage and acknowledgment, injury and reparation.

You despise a man for avarice; but you do not hate him.

If a man is not rising upward to be an angel, depend on it, he is sinking downward to be a devil.

As charity covers a multitude of sins before God, so does politeness before men.

Wealth does not bring about excellence (aka areté), but excellence (aka areté) brings about wealth and all other public and private blessings for men.

Living or dead, to a good man there can come no evil.

Let a man nobly live or nobly die.

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.

Every honest man will suppose honest acts to flow from honest principles, and the rogues may rail without intermission.

The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man.

There is an eternal conflict between the school-room and the bar-room. The school-room makes men, the bar-room destroys them.

Fill the seats of justice with good men, not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is.

Every religion is good that teaches man to be good; and I know of none that instructs him to be bad.

The man who is wise enough to know the right thing to do, who is good enough to wish to do only the right thing, and who is able and strong enough to do the right thing is a truly great man.

Little men build up great ones, but the snow colossus soon melts; the good stand under the eye of God, and therefore stand.

If thou wouldst conquer thy weakness, thou must never gratify it. No man is compelled to evil: his consent only makes it his. It is no sin to be tempted, but to be overcome.

Men's evil manners live in brass; their virtues we write in water.

To be in anger is impiety, but who is man that is not angry?

When he is best, he is a little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast.

One fact must be familiar to all those who have any experience of human nature - a sincerely religious man is often an exceedingly bad man.

Whether the gentleman is capable or not, he is loved all the same; conversely the petty man is loathed all the same.

The true man of the past waited upon Heaven when dealing with people and did not wait upon people when dealing with Heaven.