Quotes About Virtue

Honesty is basic. It is true that lying is an accomplice to every other form of vice. Or, as someone has said, 'Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.' (O. W. Holmes, in The Home Book of Quotations, p. 1111.)

The fact is, "wise girls get more" of what really matters for this life and the next!

Unhappy is that Grandeur which makes us too great to be good and that Wit which sets us at a distance from true Wisdom.

Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.

Fear of the enemy, so this argument went, had been good for Rome; without any significant external threat, 'the path of virtue was abandoned for that of corruption

Some people are too good to be real; I'm too real to be good.

To love rightly is to love what is orderly and beautiful in an educated and disciplined way.

A man content to go to heaven alone will never go to heaven.

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure --tangible material prosperity in this world --is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

Pleasure's couch is virtue's grave.

There is no sterner moralist than pleasure.

He is incapable of truly good action who finds not a pleasure in contemplating the good actions of others.

She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.

Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo

Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.

Purity,patience, and preserverance are the three essentials to success, and above all: love.

Stimulate the heart to love, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord.

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love.

You will always have to live with yourself, and it is to your best interest to see that you have good company -- a clean, pure, straight, honest, upright, generous, magnanimous companion.

Neither genius, fame, nor love show the greatness of the soul. Only kindness can do that.

Well-ordered self-love is right and natural.

Love of glory can only create a great hero; contempt of glory creates a great man.

Jealousy is the only vice that gives no pleasure.