Quotes About Virtue

A distinguishing taste of authentic Christians is their distaste for evil.

To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

The love of money is the root of all virtue.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married.

So our livesIn acts exemplary, not only winOurselves good names, but doth to others giveMatter for virtuous deeds, by which we live.

They're only truly great who are truly good.

Moderation in the pursuit of liberty is no virtue;

The phrase 'in Christ' is the phrase for the salvation-historical (heilsgeschichtlich) situation of those who belong to Christ in virtue of their existential union with the death and resurrection of Christ.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.

O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...

A rights-centered society, must, however, take seriously the fact that duties are not natural. They must be taught. Self-interest is common and steady; virtue is rare and unpredictable. A society devoted to guaranteeing a broad scope for self-interested behavior must be leavened by virtue. So measures must be taken to make virtue less rare and more predictable. Among those measures, Americans have always considered education crucial.

Presidents may run for office on ideological platforms and promised policies, but their presidency is actually defined by the encounter between fortune and virtue, between the improbable and the unexpected—the thing that neither their ideology nor their proposals prepared them for—and their response. The president's job is to anticipate what will happen, minimize the unpredictability, then respond to the unexpected with cunning and power.

There is a fierce unity to America, and simultaneously there are deep differences that turn into mutual contempt at times of stress. This tension actually has a virtue hidden within it. The tension within the country, the radical differences in culture and outlook, actually become a goad driving the country forward but leaving some behind.

The envy of excellence leads to perdition; the love of it leads to the light.

Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.

An action, to have moral worth, must be done from duty.

If you punish a child for being naughty, and reward him for being good, he will do right merely for the sake of the reward; and when he goes out into the world and finds that goodness is not always rewarded, nor wickedness always punished, he will grow into a man who only thinks about how he may get on in the world, and does right or wrong according as he finds advantage to himself.

What does it avail, one will say, that this man has so much talent, that he is so active therewith, and that he exerts thereby a useful influence over the community, thus having a great worth both in relation to his own happy condition and to the benefit of others, if he does not possess a good will?