Quotes About Virtue

You're not supposed to talk about your good deeds, I know. It effectively negates them and in the process makes people hate you.

What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess. I only know that they're incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it's a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue.

Living in the modern age, death for virtue is the wage. So it seems in darker hours. Evil wins, kindness cowers. Ruled by violence and vice we all stand upon thin ice. Are we brave or are we mice, here upon such thin, thin ice? Dare we linger, dare we skate? Dare we laugh or celebrate, knowing we may strain the ice? Preserve the ice at any price?

If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern

Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.

For what can excuse a man in the eyes of other men for lack of strength?

A woman today is good, or she is bad, according to the way she does a thing - and not because of the thing itself.

Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.

You can do more good by being good than any other way.

We can do more good by being good, than in any other way.

The last part, the part you're now approaching, was for Aristotle the most important for happiness.

I need not warn you to be discreet; that is the first virtue of any man who hopes to hold public appointments.

To be faithful to an ideal of virtue! A heroic martyrdom! Pshaw! every one believes in virtue, but who is virtuous? Nations have made an idol of Liberty, but what nation on the face of the earth is free?

Güte ist nicht ohne Klippen: man schreibt sie dem Charakter zu und erkennt die stille Bemühung einer schönen Seele nur selten an. Die Bösen dagegen belohnt man für das Böse, das sie nicht tun.

She put all her pride and self-love into making him superior to herself, and not in ruling him. Hearts without tenderness covet dominion, but a true love treasures abnegation, that virtue of strength.

Virtue, socially speaking, is the companion of a comfortable life, and comes only with education.

that virtuous middle-class which brings up ingenuous daughters to an honorable toil, giving them sterling qualities which diminish as soon as they are brought in contact with the superior world of social life;

The physician strains towards good as an artist towards beauty, each impelled by that grand sentiment which we call virtue.

Nuestras ridiculeces son causadas en gran medida por un bello sentimiento, una virtud o unas facultades llevadas al extremo. El orgullo que no se refina con el trato del gran mundo se transforma en rigidez que se apega a simples pequeñeces en vez de crecer en un círculo de sentimientos elevados.

La flatterie n'émane jamais des grandes âmes, elle est l'apanage des petits esprits qui réussissent à se rapetisser encore pour mieux entrer dans la sphère vitale de la personne autour de laquelle ils gravitent. La flatterie sous-entend un intérêt.

Las almas grandes están siempre dispuestas a hacer de una desgracia una virtud. Existe además un atractivo irresistible en obstinarse en hacer un bien en aquello en lo que los demás ven un motivo de reproche: la inocencia tiene el atractivo propio del vicio.

God Almighty's outcasts, I call them. Among them, I grant you, is virtue in all the flower of its stupidity, but poverty is no less their portion. At this moment, I think I see the long faces those good folk would pull if God played a practical joke on them and stayed away at the Last Judgment.

You are so unlucky as to walk off with something or other belonging to somebody else, and they exhibit you as a curiosity in the Place du Palais-de-Justice; you steal a million, and you are pointed out in every salon as a model of virtue. And you pay thirty millions for the police and the courts of justice, for the maintenance of law and order! A pretty slate of things it is!