Quotes About Virtue

If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!

What is love of one's country; is it hate of one's uncountry? Then it's not a good thing. Is it simply self-love? That's a good thing, but one mustn't make a virtue of it, or a profession.

Our dangers, as it seems to me, are not from the outrageous but from the conforming; not from those who rarely and under the lurid glare of obloquy upset our moral complaisance, or shock us with unaccustomed conduct, but from those, the mass of us, who take their virtues and their tastes, like their shirts and their furniture, from the limited patterns which the market offers.

I think it is extremely interesting to think that, in some cases, vice might be, finally, more redemptive than virtue.

Self-will seems to be the only virtue that takes no account of man-made laws.

Character is what we are in the dark

The measure of a man's character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

The soul follows its own laws, and the body its own likewise, and they accord by virtue of the harmony pre-established among all substances, since they are all representations of one and the same universe.

Virtue is the habit of acting according to wisdom.

Justice is charity in accordance with wisdom.

Wicked people never have time for reading," Dewey said. "It's one of the reasons for their wickedness.

Showing up early is one of the signs of a noble person....

To be daunted by no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained - who can say this is not greatness?

Being noble enough is all we can ask for in this world.

It is necessary to distinguish between the virtue and the vice of obedience.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit. —Aristotle

Then I carefully dipped my brush and wrote the characters for family, country, and book. When the examiner smiled, I knew he liked my work, so I decided to write the hardest character I knew, which was the one for virtue. It took fifteen strokes.

Los crueles son los debiles; la bondad sólo puede esperarse de los fuertes.

Not for nothing was Smith's first book about moral philosophy. His concern, as Foley says, was the one that has haunted economic thinking ever since: "how to be a good person and live a good and moral life within the antagonistic, impersonal, and self-regarding social relations that capitalism imposes.

Someone has said that even the worst sinner spends more time doing things that are good and harmless than in doing things that are bad. In other words, there is some good even in the worst of us.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

Every human being and every society is what it is by virtue of the highest to which it looks up. The city, if it is healthy, looks up, not to the laws which it can unmake as it made them, but to the unwritten laws, the divine law, the gods of the city. The city must transcend itself. ...the most important consideration concerns that which transcends the city or which is higher than the city; it does not concern things which are simply subordinate to the city.

Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.

There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.