Quotes About Virtue

Character is simply habit long continued.

Every virtue that reaches the exaggeration, is becoming a defect

In other words, any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.

The fundamentalist (or, more accurately, the beleaguered individual who comes to embrace fundamentalism) cannot stand freedom. He cannot find his way into the future, so he retreats to the past. He returns in imagination to the glory days of his race and seeks to reconstitute both them and himself in their purer, more virtuous light. He gets back to basics. To fundamentals.

In my experience, when we project a quality or virtue onto another human being, we ourselves almost always already possess that quality, but we're afraid to embrace (and to live) that truth.

Every warrior virtue proceeds from this—courage, selflessness, love of and loyalty to one's comrades, patience, self-command, the will to endure adversity.

The good alone die young.

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

Who can find a virtuous wife? For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her; so he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not evil all the days of her life. PROVERBS 31:10-12

righteousness - the moral justification to act with cruelty.

Too much virtue has a corrupting effect.

also learned a model of relating that unwittingly promoted women's psychological dependence on men and male authority. Women's personal journeys, goals, and quests were encouraged only to the extent that they didn't interfere with those of husband or children. A woman's surrender of herself on behalf of the rest of the family was (and often still is) extolled as the highest virtue.

I believe that a healthy sharing of oneself is a holy call, but so is caring for ourselves and taking time for the beautiful mysteries God created within us. The important thing is balance. Being a martyr distorts the virtuous ideal of giving to others by crossing over into victim postures and a self-denial that squelches selfhood and the creative life of the soul.

Confucius said, "People may have the finest talents, but if they are arrogant and stingy, their other qualities are not worthy of consideration.

Being a good man has nothing to do with how many touchdowns you score. But maybe, rather, how you play the game.

Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive.

Again: there is nothing inherently superior about resistance. All our claims for the righteousness of resistance rest on the rightness of the claim that the resisters are acting in the name of justice. And the justice of the cause does not depend on, and is not enhanced by, the virtue of those who make the assertion. It depends first and last on the truth of a description of a state of affairs that is, truly, unjust and unnecessary.

Just being a good person doesn't necessarily entitle you to a good life.

in the old days, silvery bells would often sound just as some Englishman or Englishwoman of particular virtue or beauty was about to be stolen away by fairies to live in strange, ghostly lands for ever.

The pigment must be mixed with the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness.

Shortly after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony in the seventeenth century, some Puritans lamented a decline from earlier virtue.

The man who willeth to do well... we should extol his virtues and speak not of his faults behind his back.

Republics are created by the virtue, public spirit, and intelligence of the citizens. They fall, when the wise are banished from the public councils, because they dare to be honest, and the profligate are rewarded, because they flatter the people in order to betray them.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.