Quotes About Virtue

Mastery" is an inappropriate image for depicting epistemological success; knowledge is an exercise not of power but of virtue.

There is strength in humility and weakness in pride.

But he who never sins can little boast Compared to him who goes and sins no more.

Forget happiness. You were called to a throne. How will you prepare for it? That is the question of virtue, Christian style.

Virtue is what happens when habitual choices have been wise.

Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn't "come naturally"—and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required "automatically," as we say.

We applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.

The line between good and evil runs, not between 'us' and 'them', but down the middle of each of us.

The old idea that the goal of Christian existence is simply "going to heaven" doesn't, in fact, do very much to stimulate the fully fledged virtue we find advocated in the New Testament.

There are temptations to idolatry at every level, and the greater the good the greater the temptation.

To begin with, you have to grasp the fact that Christian virtue isn't about you—your happiness, your fulfillment, your self-realization. It's about God and God's kingdom, and your discovery of a genuine human existence by the paradoxical route—the route God himself took in Jesus Christ!—of giving yourself away, of generous love which constantly refuses to take center stage.

Virtue, after all, isn't just about morals in the sense of "knowing the standards to live up to" or "knowing which rules you're supposed to keep." Virtue, as we have already seen, is about the whole of life, not just the specifically "moral" choices.

Holiness is multidimensional.

Your purpose is to announce the virtuous deeds of the one who called you out of darkness into his amazing light.

Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and many others speak of dying for the law, for one's country, one's friends, one's family, even for the emperor.

We too have swapped the ancient Israelite vision of God and the world (focused on the Temple and thence the new creation and brought into expression in Passover and the other great gatherings, such as the Day of Atonement) for the assumed "goal" of a Platonized "heaven," the assumed human vocation of virtue or good behavior, and the dangerously paganized vision of how humans who have failed to attain that vocation might nevertheless gain that goal.

We've had enough of pragmatists and self-seeking risk-takers. We need people of character.

The only way we can get to the heart of understanding the moral challenge Jesus offered, and offers still today, is by thinking in terms not of rules or of the calculation of effects or of romantic or existentialist "authenticity," but of virtue. A virtue that has been transformed by the kingdom and the cross.

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.

Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.

A good end cannot sanctify evil means, nor must we ever do evil that good may come of it.

And though many women might enjoy the offering of such compliments, I did not want him to love me based on temporal things like a smile or voice or presence, things that could vanish through mood or an unexpected cloud. He must love me for the sake of love alone . . .