Quotes About Virtue

Liberty itself, meanwhile, was dependent on the moral disposition of the populace. "Machiavelli, discoursing on these matters," Algernon Sidney, the seventeenth-century English theorist and politician, wrote, "finds virtue to be so essentially necessary to the establishment and preservation of Liberty, that he thinks it impossible for a corrupted People to set up a good Government, or for a Tyranny to be introduced if they be virtuous.

The task of history was to secure advances in a universe that tends to disappoint. Goodness would not always be rewarded. The innocent would suffer. Violence would at times defeat virtue. Such was the way of things, but to Lincoln the duty of the leader and of the citizen was neither to despair nor to seek solace and security with the merely strong, but to discern and to pursue the right.

As Goldwater would put it, capturing the conservative credo, "…extremism in defense of liberty—is—no—vice." (He added: "…moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!")

Like all Americans," he said, "I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads, and herds of cattle, too, big factories, steamboats and everything else. But we must keep steadily in mind that no people were ever yet benefitted by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue.

The capacity of music to reassure and to remind is one of its cardinal virtues.

True virtue never appears so lovely as when it is most oppressed; and the divine excellency of real Christianity is never exhibited with such advantage as when under the greatest trials; then it is that true faith appears much more precious than gold, and upon this account is found to praise and honour and glory.

He wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

Shouldn't goodness be its own reward? He [Perry Hildebrandt] wondered if an action, to qualify as authentically good, needed not only to be untainted by self-interest but also to bring no pleasure of any kind.

Being reliable is something. Being good.

Make us better than we are. Make us good.

Some men, under the notion of weeding out prejudice, eradicate virtue, honesty and religion.

As blushing will sometimes make a whore pass for a virtuous woman, so modesty may make a fool seem a man of sense.

Three kings protested to me, that in their whole reigns they never did once prefer any person of merit, unless by mistake, or treachery of some minister in whom they confided; neither would they do it if they were to live again: and they showed, with great strength of reason, that the royal throne could not be supported without corruption, because that positive, confident, restive temper, which virtue infused into a man, was a perpetual clog to public business.

Añadió que nuestra institución de gobierno y de ley obedecía, sencillamente, a los grandes defectos de nuestra razón y, por consiguiente, de nuestra virtud, ya que la razón por sí sola es suficiente para dirigir un ser racional.

truth, justice, temperance, and

The author's economy, and happy life, among the Houyhnhnms. His great improvement in virtue by conversing with them. Their conversations. The author has notice given him by his master, that he must depart from the country. He falls into a swoon for grief; but submits. He contrives and finishes a canoe by the help of a fellow-servant, and puts to sea at a venture. I

that the mistakes committed by ignorance in a virtuous disposition, would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and had great abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his corruptions.

Like every writer, he measured other men's virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.

Taught by centuries of living, the republic of immortal men had achieved a perfection of tolerance, almost of disdain. They knew that over an infinitely long span of time, all things happen to all men. As reward for his past and future virtues, every man merited every kindness—yet also every betrayal, as reward for his past and future iniquities.

I do not know whether music knows how to despair over music, or marble over marble, but literature is an art which knows how to prophesize the time in which it might have fallen silent, how to attack its own virtue, and how to fall in love with its own dissolution and court its own end.

I reread these negative remarks and realize that I do not know whether music can despair of music or marble of marble. I do know that literature is an art that can foresee the time when it will be silenced, an art that can become inflamed with its own virtue, fall in love with its own decline, and court its own demise.

La gloria di un poeta dipende, in definitiva, dall'eccitazione o dall'apatia delle generazioni di uomini sconosciuti che la mettono alla prova, nella solitudine delle loro biblioteche. Le emozioni che la letteratura suscita sono forse eterne, ma i mezzi devono variare costantemente, anche solo in modo leggerissimo, affinché essa non perda la sua virtù.

La tierra que habitamos es un error, una incompetente parodia. Los espejos y la paternidad son abominables, porque la multiplican y afirman. El asco es la virtud fundamental.

Adoctrinada por un ejercicio de siglos, le república de hombres inmortales había logrado la perfección de la tolerancia y casi del desdén. Sabía que en un plazo infinito le ocurren a todo hombre todas las cosas. Por sus pasadas o futuras virtudes, todo hombre es acreedor a toda bondad, pero también a toda traición, por sus infamias del pasado o del porvenir.