Quotes About Virtue

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

Self-love is no part of morality. Indeed it is exactly its counterpart. It is the sole antagonist of virtue leading us constantly by our propensities to self-gratification in violation of our moral duties to others.

The contest is not between Us and Them, but between Good and Evil, and if those who would fight Evil adopt the ways of Evil, Evil wins.

Perceiving the order of nature to be that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue, I am willing to hope it may have ordained that the fall of the wicked shall be the rise of the good. To J. Correa de Serra, Monticello, Apr. 19, 1814

A little attention however to the nature of the human mind evinces that the entertainments of fiction are useful as well as pleasant. That they are pleasant when well written, every person feels who reads. But wherein is its utility, asks the reverend sage, big with the notion that nothing can be useful but the learned lumber of Greek and Roman reading with which his head is stored? I answer, every thing is useful which contributes to fix us in the principles and practice of virtue.

Liberty is the parent of science and of virtue, and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue. "Virtue" in fact is such a dangerous word that we have to rush to explain;

In a fallen world, it was hard to do unambiguous good.

Ah, bella damigella, dignità, virtù e valore non sono riposti solo nell'abbigliamento! esclamò Balin. La virilità e l'onore sono celati nella persona, e vi sono molti insigni cavalieri ignoti a tutti, a riprova che il pregio e l'ardimento non hanno alcun rapporto con le vesti che indossano.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

L'amour affronte la Mort ; lui seul, non pas la vertu, est plus fort qu'elle. Lui seul (pas la vertu) inspire de bonnes pensées.

Las palabras que designan un rasgo de carácter siempre tienen el alcance moral de un juicio, bien sea en forma de elogio, de censura o bajo ambos aspectos.

Piety is the privatization of the world as the story of one's self and one's salvation, and without the, yes, sometimes offensive conviction that one is the object of God's special, and indeed exclusive care, without the rearrangement that places oneself and one's salvation at the center of all things, there is no piety—that is, in fact, what defines this very powerful virtue.

ceea ce te'nalta, ceea ce iti sporeste sentimentul de putere si vigoare si dominare, la dracu asta'i adevarul – chiar daca vazut din punctul de vedere al moralei ar fi de zece ori minciuna. ce vreau sa spun este ca un neadevar de natura a produce o sporire a puterii se poate masura cu orice adevar virtuos dar sterp.

Charity must teach us that friendship is a holy thing, and that it is neither charitable nor holy to base our friendship on falsehood. We can be, in some sense, friends to all men because there is no man on earth with whom we do not have something in common. But it would be false to treat too many men as intimate friends. It is not possible to be intimate with more than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common.

If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a virtue which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it.

Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

To be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree. Habitual grace brings with it all the Christian virtues in their seed.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.

something to be attained by special virtuous techniques, the less real it becomes. As it becomes less real, it recedes further into the distance of abstraction, futurity, unattainability. The

St. Thomas says [I-II, Q.34,a.4] that a man is good when his will takes joy in what is good, evil when his will takes joy in what is evil. He is virtuous when he finds happiness in a virtuous life, sinful when he takes pleasure in a sinful life. Hence the things that we love tell us what we are.

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.