Quotes About Virtue

In the first place, a man who can work for five days, or even for five minutes, without any selfish motive whatever, without thinking of future, of heaven, of punishment, or anything of the kind, has in him the capacity to become a powerful moral giant.

People who think they're generous to a fault usually think that's their only fault.

I am glad you like what I said of Mrs. Elizabeth Fry (prison and mental hospital reformer). She is very unpopular with the clergy; examples of living, active virtue disturb our repose and give one to distressing comparisons; we long to burn her alive.

The Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that man is innately good. He argued that anyone who saw a child falling into a well would immediately feel shock and alarm, and that this impulse, this universal capacity for commiseration, was proof positive that man is inherently good.

Let a young maiden, who would preserve her beauty, preserve the purity of soul, those sweet qualities of the mind, those virtues, in short, by which she first drew her lover to her feet.

In virtue of our sin, we are, in short, like perfectly well-formed creatures living in an environment that is not good for us. The oxygen-rich environment, in which we were made to live, has now been transformed by our sin into a high altitude one that asphyxiates and enervates us.

The Good Life is not the life of reason alone, but that of the dominance of reason over the spirited energies and the bodily appetites.

There will be vice as long as there are men.

The man of integrity who is true to self and to God will choose the right whether or not anyone is looking because he is self-driven, not externally controlled.

There can be no beauty if it is paid for by human injustice, nor truth that passes over injustice in silence, nor moral virtue that condones it.

The world is ruled by neither justice nor morality; crime is not punished nor virtue rewarded, one is forgotten as quickly as the other. The world is ruled by power and power is obtained with money. To work is senseless, because money cannot be obtained through work, but through exploitation of others. And if we cannot exploit as much as we wish, at least let us work as little as we can. Moral duty? We believe neither in the morality of man nor in the morality of systems. [p. 168]

Loyalty was the most fundamental of samurai virtues. Without loyalty there was nothing. To Kawakami, who had looked at loyalty from every possible angle - examining loyalty was, after all, his occupation - it had become increasingly clear that the days of personal allegiance were coming to an end. Loyalty, in the future, must be to a cause, a principle, an idea, not a man or a clan.

It takes an awfully good man... to beat no man at all." - Tillie

People need a moral code, to help them make decisions. All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

What does he have to be jealous of? No, I think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I've always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself.

Everyone was always talking about talking, and the most moral person was the one who yelled at the most other people for doing the talking all wrong.

think the mentality has its origins in the Puritan moral framework: the emphasis on fitting into a strict hierarchical structure, the element of self-loathing, the horror of anything pleasurable or artistic or unregimented . . . But I've always wondered how that paradigm made the transition to become the boundary, not just of virtue, but of reality itself.

All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market. But the problem is that it's all backwards. It's not that you do the right thing and hope it pays off; the morally right thing is by definition the thing that gives the biggest payoff.

heartless wife who, instead of being grieved at the death of her husband, is rejoiced at it, should be taught that society will not respect her unless she pays to the memory of the man whose name she bears that "homage which vice pays to virtue," a commendable respect to the usages of society in the matter of mourning and of retirement from the world.

And if you inquire for the good of your brethren only, what more have 21 ye done than others? is not this the conduct of the publicans also?

An evil man was more bearable to the majority of men than a good man, who was a constant reproach and therefore to be despised.

With the help of God I shall be kinder than my brother, and shall strive for virtue. It is my duty to aspire above my human nature.'"*

bien. Es tan poderoso como la virtud y en muchos casos

Los ciudadanos corrompidos incuban gobernantes corruptos, y es la multitud la que, a fin de cuentas, decide cuándo ha de morir la virtud».