Quotes About Virtues

if I do OK with women, it's not because of the virtues I have, but because of the shadows I don't have.

No es preciso que un príncipe posea todas las virtudes citadas, pero es indispensable que aparente poseerlas

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

No pain, no gain. Without danger, the virtue of courage cannot be developed. Without trials and tribulations we can have no patience. God has to permit sin before we can experience forgiveness. Higher-order virtues are dependent on allowing lower-order evils.

Sailors need to know when to use ballast or throw down the anchor, lest the ship sink and they drown. In like manner, the virtues enable us to respond correctly to those moments of life that are the moral equivalents to such conditions at sea.

But if we pay heed to the ancient sources, we will recognize that the virtues are related to a much thicker and deeper moral reality. We will see the virtues as the qualities of character that we need in order to steer our way through the complicated and mysterious sea of morality into which we all have been placed. For such journeying a pocketful of values is neither sufficient ballast nor a substitute for sails, compass, or sextant. C

The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end. Whereas values, according to their common usage, are the instruments or components of moral living that the self chooses for itself and that the self may disregard without necessarily jeopardizing its identity.

religious and philosophical ethicists have not reflected much on children as moral learners or written much on the virtues as taught and communicated in children's stories. Perhaps this is because, like so many others, ethicists too subscribe to the falsehood that childhood is more about socialization than moral formation.

You have no one who has any sort of consideration for you. You have had patience and endurance till I am sick of the virtues, and what have they done for you? Half-killed you.

I was an infant when my parents died. Thye both were ornithologists. I've tried So often to evoke them that today I have a thousand parents. Sadly they Dissolve in their own virtues and recede, But certain words, chance words I hear or read, Such as bad heart always to him refer, And cancer of the pancreas to her.

Q: What is the best thing men do? A: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.

Problems are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.

I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.

I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.

It will be your duty, and it will be your pleasure too to estimate her (as you chose her) by the qualities that she has, and not by the qualities she may not have.

was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that everything was to be paid for. Nobody was ever on any account to give anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase. Gratitude was to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be. Every inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a bargain across a counter. And if we didn't get to Heaven that way, it was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle with ourselves, and change our very weaknesses into stanch and most magnanimous virtues!

When Death strikes down the innocent and young, for every fragile form from which he lets the panting spirit free, a hundred virtues rise, in shapes of mercy, charity, and love, to walk the world, and bless it. Of every tear that sorrowing mortals shed on such green graves, some good is born, some gentler nature comes. In the Destroyer's steps there spring up bright creations that defy his power, and his dark path becomes a way of light to Heaven.

persuading himself that he was a most conscientious and glorious martyr, [he] nobly resolved to do what, if he had examined his own heart a little more carefully, he would have found he could not resist. Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle with ourselves, and change our very weaknesses into stanch and most magnanimous virtues!

The church was old and grey, with ivy clinging to the walls, and round the porch. Shunning the tombs, it crept about the mounds, beneath which slept poor humble men: twining for them the first wreaths they had ever won, but wreaths less liable to wither and far more lasting in their kind, than some which were graven deep in stone and marble, and told in pompous terms of virtues meekly hidden for many a year, and only revealed at last to executors and mourning legatees.

Ah Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues—faith and hope. This was the pride which swelled Mrs. Nickleby's heart that night, and this it was which left upon her face, glistening in the light when they returned home, traces of the most grateful tears she had ever shed.

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

Patience is sister to meekness, and humility is its mother.