Quotes About Virtue

Law describes the way things would work if men were angels.

Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other.

Death will not be denied. To try is grandiose. It drives madness into the soul. It leaches out virtue. It injects poison into friendship, and makes a mockery of love.

Humility is like underwear; essential,but indecent if it shows

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR

And in time, and by being a good woman, and a patient woman, she would have won a good and patient man.

Virtue and wisdom are sublime things, but if they create pride and a consciousness of separateness from the rest of humanity, they are only the snakes of self reappearing in a finer form.

Riches and power are but gifts of blind fate, whereas goodness is the result of one's own merits.

It is not by sin that we attain happiness, nor is it by virtue, nor is it by that kind of divine fire by which one makes great instinctive decisions and which is neither good not evil. It is by none of these things that one reaches happiness. One never reaches happiness.

A flexible vice may not be so easy to ridicule as a rigid virtue.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.

Before crime is committed conscience must be corrupted, and every bad man who succeeds in reaching a high point of wickedness begins with this.

Good men do the most harm.

Patriotism must be founded on great principals and supported by great virtue.

And so it must be in every man while his moral habits are not purified; and, though there may be many shades, some of a more and some a less pronounced and settled character, yet there are, after all, only two main classes. A man must either deny or indulge himself. There is no middle or indifferent state—for the not denying is indulgence; it is throwing the reins on the neck of his lusts, though he may lack boldness to set the spur;

Goodness is the only investment which never fails.

The rich man is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.

A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.

What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.

The peculiarity of ill-temper is that it is the vice of the virtuous. It is often the one blot on an otherwise noble character. You know men who are all but perfect, and women who would be entirely perfect, but for an easily ruffled, quick-tempered, or "touchy" disposition. This compatibility of ill-temper with high moral character is one of the strangest and saddest problems of ethics.