Quotes About Virtue

All amusements to which virtuous women are not admitted, are, rely upon it, deleterious in their nature.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.

Few men speak humbly of humility, chastely of chastity, skeptically of skepticism.

Virtue is an inner strength. It expands your nature.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

The life, which others pay, let us bestow, And give to fame what we to nature owe.

Human nature is disposed to do good.

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

Happy the man whom indulgent fortune allows to pay to virtue what he owes to nature, and to make a generous gift of what must otherwise be ravished from him by cruel necessity.

Note that the eating of flesh is not only physically against nature, but it also makes us spiritually coarse and gross by reason of satiety and surfeit.

If you live according to nature, you never will be poor; if according to the world's caprice, you will never be rich.

Man is neither by birth nor disposition a savage, nor of unsocial habits, but only becomes so by indulging in vices contrary to his nature.

Nothing is rarer than true good nature; they who are reputed to have it are generally only pliant or weak.

She was cold by nature, self-love predominating over passion; rather than being virtuous, she preferred to have her pleasures all to herself.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

Of all things, none does not revere the Way and honor virtue. Reverence of the Way and honoring virtue were not demanded of them, but it is in their nature.

The order of nature [is] that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue.

The true joy of humankind is in doing that which is most proper to our nature; and the first property of people is to be kindly affected towards them that are of one kind with ourselves.

Our (the Stoic) motto, as you know, is live according to nature.

Whether the law of marriage be instituted or not, the dictate of nature and virtue seems to be an early attachment to one woman.

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

Beauty without a character is a waste.