Quotes About Virtues

Much better stay in company! To love you must have someone else, Giving requires a legatee, Good neighbours need whole parishfuls Of folk to do it on - in short, Our virtues are all social; if, Deprived of solitude, you chafe, It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.

Judging by the virtues expected of a servant, does your Excellency know many masters who would be worthy valets?

My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.

I admire sensible, kind people. They're not often famous.

Americans tend to prefer their presidents on horseback: heroes who dream big and sound trumpets. There is, however, another kind of leader – quieter and less glamorous but no less significant – whose virtues repay our attention. There is greatness in political lives dedicated more to steadiness than to boldness, more to reform than to revolution, more to management of complexity than to the making of mass movements.

It's Shakespeare, to have a single family in which human flaws and virtues are on such vivid display—and the constant struggle between those vices and those virtues to try to do good and fulfill one's duty.

for as health is but one thing, and has been always the same, whereas diseases are by thousands, besides new and daily additions, so all the virtues that have been ever in mankind are to be counted upon a few fingers, but his follies and vices are innumerable, and time adds hourly to the heap. 

No digo esto con la más pequeña intención de disminuir las muchas virtudes de aquel excelente rey, cuyos méritos, sin embargo, temo que habrán de quedar muy mermados a los ojos del lector inglés con este motivo; pero juzgo que este defecto tiene por origen la ignorancia de aquel pueblo, que todavía no ha reducido la política a una ciencia

Fuera de algunas amistades y de muchas costumbres, el problemático ejercicio de la literatura constituía su vida; como todo escritor, medía las virtudes de los otros por lo ejecutado por ellos y pedía que los otros lo midieran por lo que vislumbraba o planeaba.

A bullet's velocity in low temperatures greatly depends on its target's virtues

Our time has changed, and it's changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that's what it's not doing, and that's why it's ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.

The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.

Truth is inclusive of all the virtues, is older than sects or schools, and, like charity, more ancient than mankind.

These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed. . . . Great necessities call out great virtues.

Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.

T]he people who fail in the struggle for existence-that is, those who become vassals and are thereby condemned to vanish-are those who do not display the heroic virtues, or who fall victim to the trickery of the parasites. And even in this latter case, the failure is not so much a lack of intelligence but rather of courage and determination-which then tries to conceal itself beneath a cloak of humanitarianism.

I]t's not material qualities but rather ideal virtues alone that lead to the formation of a state. Only under the protection of those virtues can economic activities be developed... The material interests of humanity can prosper only in the shadow of heroic virtues. As soon as they become the primary considerations of life, they destroy the basis of their own existence.

The goal of embodying Christian ethics - if you want to call yourself a Christian - is being patient and loving with your neighbor.

Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them.

A few vices are sufficient to darken many virtues.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals

From our ancestors come our names from our virtues our honor.

From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues our honors.

Courage. Kindness. Friendship. Character. These are the qualities that define us as human beings, and propel us, on occasion, to greatness.