Quotes About Virtue

Good thoughts and actions can never produce bad results.

Only as men succeed in seeing no evil in others will they become free from sin, and sorrow, and suffering.

It is primarily the love of ourselves as destiny, the affection for our own destiny that can convince us to undertake this work to become habitually detached from our own opinions and our own imaginations (not to eliminate but to detach ourselves from them!), so that all of our cognitive energy will be focused upon a search for the truth of the object, no matter what it should be. This love is the ultimate inner movement, the supreme emotion that persuades us to seek true virtue.

Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time.

Is it a crime to want to be good? she cried

Better a shamed face than a stained heart,' Teresita announced.

Goodness and hard work are rewarded with respect.

We do not become righteous by doing righteous deed but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds.

The works of the righteous would be mortal sins if they would not be feared as mortal sins by the righteous themselves out of pious fear of God.

The fruit does not make the tree good or bad but the tree itself is what determines the nature of the fruit. In the same way, a person first must be good or bad before doing a good or bad work.

It cannot, indeed, be denied, that a good man is more worthy of love than a bad one.

Now all these virtues mean one thing, and that is bravery. A Sioux boy was taught to be brave always. It was not sufficient to be brave enough to go to war. He must be brave enough to make personal sacrifices and to think little of personal gain. To be brave was the supreme test of a Sioux boy, and this bravery might receive a greater test in times of peace than in times of war.

hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' ...hope is our positive orientation toward the future, a future in which we simultaneously recognize difficulty, responsibility, and delight. Hope is not relative to the present situation, nor is it dependent upon a specific outcome... Hope is not an antidote to despair, or a sidestepping of difficulty, but a companion to all these things.

Hope is 'that virtue by which we take responsibility for the future.' Not just responsibility for our individual futures but also for that of the world.

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Every yielding to temptation is a hindrance, not a help, to moral development; but every temptation offers what, rightly employed, is an indispensable means of moral development. For all moral development is through temptation to virtue.

The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.

Do not think that you can fight corruption without while you let corruption fester within.

There can be no virtue without temptation; for virtue is victory over temptation.

An untempted soul may be innocent, but cannot be virtuous, for virtue is the choice of right when wrong presses itself upon us and demands our choosing.

If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.

But order is not itself a virtue: it is only a means to an end. The end is general comfort and general convenience, and she never sacrifices the end to the means.

It is true that wisdom has wealth in the one hand and pleasure in the other, that her ways are ways of pleasantness, her paths are paths of peace; but she will never come to one who follows her for the sake of the wealth in the one hand or the pleasure in the other.

We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.