Quotes About Virtue

In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.

Impatience is a virtue.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

It is certain that, because the negligent do not struggle against self, they never achieve peace of soul or do so tardily, and never possess any virtue in its fullness, while the energetic and industrious make notable advances on both fronts.

You a role model by way of someone will model after your role. They'll model themselves after what they perceive is success. That doesn't mean they take your morality and virtue seriously. They want what you want, and they're willing to do what you do to get it.

In Islamic societies, politicians can manipulate almost everything. But thus far, no fundamentalist leader has been able to convince his supporters to renounce Islam's central virtue - the principle of strict equality between human beings, regardless of sex, race, or creed.

The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.

I add this, that rational ability without education has oftener raised man to glory and virtue, than education without natural ability.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

Virtue itself scapes not calumnious strokes.

I'm not saying that atheists can't act morally or have moral knowledge. But when I ascribe virtue to an atheist, it's as a theist who sees the atheist as conforming to objective moral values. The atheist, by contrast, has no such basis for morality. And yet all moral judgments require a basis for morality, some standard of right and wrong.

What I think is remarkable is the force of habit and the fact that while we can have a practice for doing something that has been repetitive and established over many, many years, it doesn't actually mean there's any virtue to doing it that way at all.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Blessedness is not the reward of virtue but virtue itself.

Nothing in the world causes more problems than concepts of ethnic virtue. It's irrelevant.

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Believe me, 'tis a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue.

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.

Compassion is not a popular virtue. Very often when I talk to religious people, and mention how important it is that compassion is the key, that it's the sine-qua-non of religion, people look kind of balked, and stubborn sometimes, as much to say, what's the point of having religion if you can't disapprove of other people?

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.