Quotes About Virtue

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Handsome is that handsome does.

The good man suffers but to gain, And every virtue springs from pain; As aromatic plants bestow No spicy fragrance while they grow; But crush'd or trodden to the ground, Diffuse their balmy sweets around.

That virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarce worth the sentinel.

Thus, my children, after men have travelled through a few stages in vice, shame forsakes them, and returns back to wait upon the few virtues they have still remaining.

There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence, that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue.

Though a warrior must often suppress other emotions on the battlefield, love is the exception—because embodied in that virtue are all the best qualities a human can possess.

Woman is in the image of God equally with man. The sexes are of equal worth. Their virtues are equal, their struggles are equal … Would a man be able to compete with a woman who lives her life to the full? Gregory of Nyssa Let us make Man in our Image and Likeness, 2nd

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.

Elementarze to wst?p do lektury ksi??ek. Ksi??ki s? zagro?eniem dla cnoty. A cnota jest tym wi?ksza im wi?ksza jest niewiedza.

Quality of work is directly related to the quality of a person's character.

Whereas goodness makes greatness teachable, greatness makes goodness touchable.

In short, contrary to the founders—and in ways they do not realize themselves—Americans today are heedlessly pursuing a vision of freedom that is short-lived and suicidal. Once again, freedom without virtue, leadership without character, business without trust, law without customs, education without meaning and medicine, science and technology without human considerations can end only in disaster.

Thus a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices. ST. AUGUSTINE, CITY OF GOD

Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Rochefoucauld's maxim

This means that, bad though it is and dangerous though its slipway may prove, there is a sense in which hypocrisy may be preferable to wickedness. Hypocrisy still cares enough about virtue to want to pretend to be virtuous, or at least it recognizes that the society around still prizes virtue enough to make it worth flattering.

Americans might ponder two quotations. One is the much-cited, self-congratulatory saying attributed to Tocqueville (but whose source no one has so far been able to show me): "America is great because America is good." The other is the very real saying of Samuel Johnson, attacking the similar self-congratulatory "greatness" of the English: "We continue every day to show by new proofs, that no people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous.

Actions punishable by jail sentences are not the only crimes. If we knew the antonym of crime, I think we would know its true nature. God . . . salvation . . . love . . . light. But for God there is the antonym Satan, for salvation there is perdition, for love there is hate, for light there is darkness, for good, evil. Crime and prayer? Crime and repentance? Crime and confession? Crime and ... no, they're all synonymous. What is the opposite of crime?

Scoundrels [...] simply don't die. The ones who die are always the gentle, sweet, and beautiful people. [...] Scoundrels live a long time. The beautiful die young.

Heaven forbid if beauty were to have substance. Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue

Genuine beauty is always meaningless, without virtue.

What a holy thing uncorrupted virginity is, I thought.

He'll be back soon," she said, her face grave. It suddenly occurred to me that what people call "honesty" might well refer to just such an expression. I wondered if what the word originally meant was not something lovable like that expression, rather than the stern virtue smelling of textbooks of morality.

?lim ola?anüstüdür ancak pervas?zca davran?p ermi?li?iyle gösteri? yapmak korkakl?kt?r.