Quotes About Virtue

If we entertain temptations, soon they begin entertaining us!

The "man of Christ" knows that the collapse of systems is always preceded by the collapse of individuals. Camelot began to give way to the world the moment Lancelot and Guinevere gave way to their appetites.

While I remained ambitious, punctual, and hedonistic at home, I had learned to better appreciate the timeless beauties and blessings of nature, to value sincerity as a cardinal virtue and reject the Western reverence for affectation and hypocrisy, and to make my frantic life pause for sunrises, sunsets, and full moons.

The fruit of the Spirit is not spouse control or staff control or environmental control; it is self-control (see Gal. 5:23).

la virtud y la generosidad son recompensadas de un modo inescrutable.

In love, unlike politics, caution is not usually a virtue.

It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.

One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good.

The patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.

It is not titles that honour men, but men that honour titles.

Because just as good morals, if they are to be maintained, have need of the laws, so the laws, if they are to be observed, have need of good morals.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

The implicit social contract is that upper-class girls will keep their virtue, while young men will find satisfaction in the brothels. And the brothels will be staffed with slave girls trafficked from Nepal or Bangladesh or poor Indian villages. As long as the girls are uneducated, low-caste peasants like Meena, society will look the other way—just as many antebellum Americans turned away from the horrors of slavery because the people being lashed looked different from them.

Nicholas Guild

We value cleverness and intelligence and strength. Money, too. But nice is incredibly special. And it's not so easy to be this way all the time, you know? Other people are very difficult. It takes a lot of effort to understand them and stay nice despite everything.

When Milton said that he could not praise a 'fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary'

there always have been and always will be men who wish to dominate women, the peculiar iniquity of religion is to turn misogyny into a part of the divine order: to make sexism a virtue and equality a sin.

Character is what you do when no one else is watching.

Do the right thing. It's that simple. Do the right thing when the right thing is not popular. Do the right thing when no one else is around. Do the right thing when temptation tells you otherwise. Do the right thing all the time.

Sowohl die heidnische wie auch die romantische Liebe ist unschuldig; lasterhaft ist nur die satte und hygienische Sexulaität zwischen Gleichen.

Die Wahrheit des Menschen ist nichts weiter als eine aufrichtige Überzeugung. Wahrheit ist, was wir als Wahrheit beurteilen, nachdem wir die Gründe erwogen, die Argumente bedacht und unsere Überzeugung auf das breiteste Fundament der Aufrichtigkeit und Ehrlichkeit gestellt haben. Die Wahrheit ist eine Tugend - wie die Blüte, die manchen harten und knorrigen moralischen Wurzeln entstammt. Vielleicht sollte man in der Logik lediglich ein Kapitel der Ethik sehen.

To educate the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration.

Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as a virtue.

Virtue alone is the unerring sign of a noble soul.