Virtue Quotes

Virtue consists not in abstaining from vice but in not desiring it.

George Bernard Shaw

Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty.

Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A virtue to be serviceable must like gold be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

The Saints are the Sinners who keep on trying.

Robert Louis Stevenson

No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

If a man has no vices he's in great danger of making vices about his virtues and there's a spectacle.

Thornton Wilder

When men grow virtuous in their old age they only make a sacrifice to God of the devil's leavings.

If virtue were its own reward it would no longer be a human quality but supernatural.

Let him who believes in immortality enjoy his happiness in silence without giving himself airs about it.

Goethe

One's outlook is a part of his virtue.

Louisa May Alcott

Virtue is like a rich stone best plain set.

Sir Francis Bacon

Recommend to your children virtue that alone can make them happy not gold.

Beethoven

Honor is the reward of virtue.

Cicero

I believe that Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.

Charles Dickens

There are those who have nothing chaste but their ears and nothing virtuous but their tongues.

De Finod

The only reward of virtue is virtue.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

La Rochefoucauld

Virtue is an angel but she is a blind one and must ask of Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

I prefer an accommodation vice to an obstinate virtue.

Molière

Virtue is health vice is sickness.

Petrarch

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Humility is a virtue and it is a virtue innate in guests.

The sun though it passes through dirty places yet remains as pure as before.

There are few virtues which the Poles do not possess and there are few errors they have ever avoided.

Winston Churchill

Virtue has its own reward but no sale at the box office.

Mae West

When virtue has slept she will get up more refreshed.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

George Washington

Purity is obscurity.

I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.

There are few chaste women who are not tired of their trade.

La Rochefoucauld

Virtues are worth more than the material things.

Courage is chief among virtues. For when any virtue is challenged, it is courage alone that can restore virtue.

Jack B. Nicholson

What about the virtue of letting others be themselves? Is this not the greatest virtue of all?

It is said a virtuous woman is worth more than rubies. But I believe many men discover the hard way that virtue, like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.

If being alive is not a virtue, then there is little virtue in virtue.

You instinctively display the greatest virtue, or rather the chief defect, of us eccentric Parisians- that is, you assume the vices you have not, and conceal the virtues you possess.

Alexandre Dumas

Withersoever the wheel of Fortune turns, Virtue stands firm upon her feet.

Benvenuto Cellini

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

Friedrich Nietzsche

There is an aesthetic dimension to virtue. In real life, as opposed to in celluloid, we are attracted to the good and repelled by the bad. Even the woman who says she prefers the archetypal 'bad boy' probably doesn't actually like it when he is bad toward her.

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him...As for the virtuous poor...they have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very poor pottage.

Of all fragrances, the sweetest is that of virtue.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity— a virtuous woman. Anything, Devil, but that.

Virtue is too passive, too narrow. Virtue can motivate individuals, but for groups, societies, a whole civilisation, it’s a weak force. Nations are never virtuous, though they might sometimes think they are.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see

G.K. Chesterton

Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold for in Algiers; another, by following this calculation, will find countries where a man is worth nothing, and others where he is worth less than nothing. They assess men like herds of livestock. According to them, a man has no value to the State apart from what he consumes in it. Thus one Sybarite would have been worth at least thirty Lacedaemonians. Would someone therefore hazard a guess which of these two republics, Sparta or Sybaris, was overthrown by a handful of peasants and which one made Asia tremble?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all things! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.

I have an acute sense of delicacy. Naturally I am prejudiced in favour of virtue.("The Accursed Cordonnier")

I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so questioned.

Philippa Gregory

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background.

War, not peace, produces virtue. War, not peace, purges vice. War, and preparation for war, call forth all that is noble and honorable in a man. It unites him with his brothers and binds them in selfless love, eradicating in the crucible of necessity all which is base and ignoble. There in the holy mill of murder the meanest of men may seek and find that part of himself, concealed beneath the corrupt, which shines forth brilliant and virtuous, worthy of honor before the gods. Do not despise war, my young friend, nor delude yourself that mercy and compassion are virtues superior to andreia, to manly valor.

Steven Pressfield

Some men may be snared by beauty alone, but none can be held except by virtue and compliance.

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Søren Kierkegaard

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.

The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue.

.. is there not one true coin for which all things ought to exchange?- and that is wisdom; and only in exchange for this, and in company with this, is anything truly bought or sold, whether courage, temperance or justice. And is not all true virtue the companion of wisdom, no matter what fears or pleasures or other similar goods or evils may or may not attend her? But the virtue which is made up of these goods, when they are severed from wisdom and exchanged with one another, is a shadow of virtue only, nor is there any freedom or health or truth in her; but in the true exchange there is a purging away of all these things, and temperance, and justice, and courage, and wisdom herself, are a purgation of them.

Socrates

...a great man who is vicious will only be a great doer of evil, and a rich man who is not liberal will be only a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it - and not by spending as he please but by knowing how to spend it well. To the poor gentleman there is no other way of showing that he is a gentleman than by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered and helpful; not haughty, arrogant or censorious, but above all by being charitable...and no one who sees him adorned with the virtues I have mentioned, will fail to recognize and judge him, though he know him not, to be of good stock.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

1 2 3 … 13 Next