Quotes About Virtue

Once again prosperous and successful crime goes by the name of virtue; good men obey the bad, might is right and fear oppresses law.

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

Tis the upright mind that holds true sovereignty.

The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because in the degradation of woman the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source.

Love recognises virtue even in sin, truth in error. … [L]ove is free, universal, in its nature[.]

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

The only sign of "superiority" I acknowledge in Man is goodness.

It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.

Good people are good people, religion has nothing to do with it.

Those who are patient in the trivial things in life and control themselves will one day have the same mastery in great and important things.

Keep doing the right. God is building character in you, and you are passing that test. Remember, the greater the struggle, the greater the reward.

Foresight is a virtue and averts many a misfortune.

All the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arise, not from want of honor or virtue, but from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

There are persons whom in my heart I despise, others I abhor. Yet I am not obliged to inform the one of my contempt, nor the other of my detestation. This kind of dissimulation...is a necessary branch of wisdom, and so far from being immoral...that it is a duty and a virtue.

The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families.

It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised, and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities which would otherwise lay dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman.

Knowledge in the head and virtue in the heart, time devoted to study or business, instead of show and pleasure, are the way to be useful and consequently happy.

Now to what higher object, to what greater character, can any mortal aspire than to be possessed of all this knowledge, well digested and ready at command, to assist the feeble and friendless, to discountenance the haughty and lawless, to procure redress to wrongs, the advancement of rights, to assert and maintain liberty and virtue to discourage and abolish tyranny and vice.

All the perplexities, confusions, and distresses in America arise, not from defects in their constitution or confederation, nor from want of honor or virtue, as much from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.

I cannot think it either Vanity or Virtue to acknowledge, that the Acquisition and communication of Knowledge, are the sole Entertainment of my Life