Quotes About Virtue

Even as you seek a virtuous, fair, and good spouse,... it is fitting that you should be the same. —Saint Bernardino of Siena

We ought to be moved to choose the good not simply through a cold and gritty decision driven by our intellect or our will, but also by our heart.

Filthy talk makes us feel comfortable with filthy action.

Human life spans, regrettably, were a couple of centuries too short for patience to stop being a virtue and become a habit.

Then there were the general moral duties: not to commit adultery or fornication, not to stay out late at night after 8 p.m. frequenting inns and brothels, and not to play cards except during the Twelve Days of Christmas.

It is, but a virtue taken to extremes is a vice. If one does not understand there are things more important than the truth one doesn't understand how important the truth is.

The opposite of passion is not virtue but routine. - Daphne with her Thighs in Bark

In absolute and general perfection lies stifling monotony and death. Nature must have contrasts; she must have shadows as well as highlights; sorrow with happiness; both wrong and right; and sin as well as virtue.

Learn humility, while there's yet time--': those were the last of the abbot's words he had waited to hear. All very well, he thought, to be humble in accepting one's own pain and deprivation, perhaps, but what right have I, what right has he, to make a virtue of meekness when it will be Adam who suffers? I call that cheap humility.

To read is not a virtue; but to read well is an art, and an art that only the born reader can acquire. The gift of reading is no exception to the rule that all natural gifts need to be cultivated by practice and discipline; but unless the innate aptitude exist the training will be wasted. It is the delusion of the mechanical reader to think that intentions may take the place of aptitude.

she likes being good, and I like being happy.

Real reading is reflex action; the born reader reads as unconsciously as he breathes; and, to carry the analogy a degree farther, reading is no more a virtue than breathing.

Of course he's good-he's too stupid to be bad

Society is indeed a contract. ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

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It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

A brave people will certainly prefer liberty, accompanied with a virtuous poverty, to a depraved and wealthy servitude. But before the price of comfort and opulence is paid, one ought to be pretty sure it is real liberty which is purchased, and that she is to be purchased at no other price. I shall always, however, consider that liberty as very equivocal in her appearance, which has not wisdom and justice for her companions; and does not lead prosperity and plenty in her train.

I shall begin with the third sort of words; compound abstracts, such as virtue, honor, persuasion, docility. Of these I am convinced, that whatever power they may have on the passions, they do not derive it from any representation raised in the mind of the things for which they stand. As compositions, they are not real essences, and hardly cause, I think, any real ideas.

where there is no sound reason, there can be no real virtue.

ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be opened through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will . . . than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence.

Enquanto a vergonha mantiver sua vigia, a virtude não será inteiramente extinta do coração, nem a moderação será totalmente exilada das mentes dos tiranos.

É melhor valorizar a virtude e humanidade, deixando muito ao livre-arbítrio, mesmo com alguma perda para o objeto, do que tentar tornar os homens meras máquinas e instrumentos de uma benevolência política.