Quotes About Morality

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

Wrong people are wrong not because of their faults but because of their presumed virtues.

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.

Authenticity, living your truth, kindness - these are necessary virtues.

To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.

In this era in which we live, the old-fashioned virtues grow increasingly unpopular.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

Crimes, like virtues, are their own rewards.

You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.

There is no cure for the pride of a virtuous nation but pure religion.

What innocence, may I ask, is being played here when it is known that this virtuous damsel has already got a dozen illegitimate children?

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.

Hollywood wants its heroes to be virtuous, but it defines virtue in a way that excludes any action that is self-interested. If virtue means putting others ahead of self, then it's clear that most people, let alone most capitalists, aren't very virtuous.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

Be virtuous in thought and in deed. God has planted in you, for a purpose, a divine urge which may be easily subverted to evil and destructive ends.

I'm not a vegetarian. But I think people who are vegetarians, they are actually more virtuous than the rest of us. I think they should be admired.

To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.

You can be a virtuous person without faith in God.

Every child is innocent because it has not been tempted, but only when we have been tempted and have remained pure, or when we have fallen, repented and reformed, are we virtuous.

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.