Quotes About Virtue

Having left, for various reasons, the homeland of epic, they were uprooted like trees overthrown, they had lost their heroic character and deep-seated virtue.

We are the gods of poverty, but why should we be ashamed in front of those gods of good fortune? We and they, all of us, have our own fates. Not only that, but while they are on friendly terms with emperors, aristocrats, feudal lords, the privileged class and, yes, wealthy townspeople, and provide them with different kinds of luxury and splendor, they're not intimate with men of virtue at all.

The wise men and men of noble character in the past who were wealthy and exalted were rare. From time to time there were men who received high rank and large stipends, but they did not pursue such things themselves; because the genius and virtues of these men were not hidden, they were promoted by their superiors, and thus only received these things unavoidably. But because they were not always in tune with the minds of men of little caliber, many of them were slandered and driven away.

only by having a clear idea what virtue is can I practice evil with a light heart.

You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it.

Let the blessing of Saint Peter's Master be… upon all that are lovers of virtue, and dare trust in his Providence, and be quiet and go a-angling.

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

We are passing through an eerie phase of history in which the things that everyone really knows are treated as unheard-of doctrines, a time in which the elements of common decency are themselves attacked as indecent. Nothing quite like this has ever happened before. Although our civilization has passed through quite a few troughs of immorality, never before has vice held the high moral ground.

The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." —Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

A wise man governs his eyes, not because it is wrong to delight in beauty, but because otherwise his delight may suffer transmutation into something very different.

1.) To repent without despairing; (2.) To believe without being presumptuous; (3.) To rejoice without falling into levity; (4.) To be angry without sinning.

Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught.

Everyone tries to define this thing called Character. It's not hard. Character is doing what's right when nobody's looking.

Hate no one; hate their vices, not themselves.

A good name is seldom regained. When character is gone, all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost.

[The] men of the technostructure are the new and universal priesthood. Their religion is business success; their test of virtue is growth and profit. Their bible is the computer printout; their communion bench is the committee room.

Boldness is a great virtue, but it does not begin on the battlefield or in the midst of a great conflict. Our boldness must begin in our prayer life.

Personally I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

Knowledge cannot be pursued without morality.

The gospel, as Paul knew, is folly to pagans. Trusting it would appear, not as a virtue, but as a vice. "Faith" of this Pauline sort can therefore come about only in response to the grace and revelation of the God of Abraham, the God who raised Jesus from the dead.

Such a dream would be the moral or even emotional equivalent of a poor person suddenly winning the lottery: without effort, suddenly all your problems are over! Just pray about it and there won't be any more moral battles! But virtue is not like that, and Christian moral living is not like that either. The romantic dream of an inner transformation that will make moral effort unnecessary is untrue both to the New Testament and to worldwide and millennia-long Christian experience.

And, once again, this contextualizing of Christian virtue within the redemptive eschatological framework underscores the great revolution in virtue ethics that took place from Paul onward, or as Paul would say, from the cross of Jesus Christ onward: the dethroning of pride and the enthroning of humility and gratitude.

The gift is the gift of the path to a richer, more responsible humanness; authenticity includes the choice to make an act of will despite desire, not simply bringing desire and will into line. To choose to believe, to choose to continue to believe, to choose to be faithful, loyal, and trustworthy, despite all the pressures to unbelief and disloyalty, is typical of the choices that constitute, or contribute toward, the life of Christian virtue.