Quotes About Morality

The rewards of virtue alone abide secure.

The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.

I'm really tired of virtue.

Me, myself, personally, I like to keep myself private. I have never said I am a paragon of virtue, a model of morality. I simply do what I do.

We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse.

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.

In this country, most people feel that being successful in their business is a virtue, not a vice, and once we begin to identify it as a vice, this country is going down.

Free speech may be a right, but only by using it as a force for good in the world do we make it a virtue.

In America, we have equated personal business success with public virtue.

A republican government can only be supported by virtue; and the end of all our legislation should be to encourage our fellow citizens in its daily practice.

Much has already been said about the indisputable integrity of men such as AB Bardhan and Prakash Karat. So, why is it that while the sleaze and slime of the political underbelly puts us off, we aren't warmed by the relative virtue and scrubbed-clean morality of the Marxists?

The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.

A few vices are sufficient to darken many virtues.

Someone may ask, 'How is justice greater than all the other virtues?' The other virtues gratify the one who possesses them; justice does not give pleasure to the one possessing it, but instead pleases others.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

So, to praise others for their virtues can but encourage one's own efforts.

The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

The society we live in has always taught us to believe that a woman of substance is one who has great virtues and moral values.

Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.

I neither drink nor smoke, because my schoolmaster impressed upon me three cardinal virtues; cleanliness in person, cleanliness in mind; temperance.