Virtue Quotes - Page 2

He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It all seemed a hollow sham now - that strict code, that conscientious virtue that condemned her to the sterile joys of pious women! No, no, she'd had enough of that; she wanted to live!

Émile Zola

Areté is a word that means excellence in character and life. It is the accumulation of virtue in one's life.

Tobin Wilson

Her mind, shaped so long before my own, was for me the equivalent of what had been offered me by the behaviour of the girls of the little gang along the sea-shore. Mme de Guermantes offered me, tamed and subdued by good manners, by respect for intellectual values, the energy and charm of a cruel little girl from one of the noble families around Combray, who from her childhood had ridden horses, sadistically tormented cats, gouged out the eyes of rabbits, and, while remaining a paragon of virtue, might equally well have been, some years back now, and so much did she share his dashing style, the most glamorous mistress of the Prince de Sagan.

Marcel Proust

Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Gabriela Popa

Let the truth be told: There is no virtue anywhere. Life is sly and unscrupulous, a blackguard, wolfish, severe. In service to itself, it will commit any offense. So, too, is Death possessed of infinite strategies and a gaunt nature—but also mercy, also grace and tenderness. In his own country, Death can be kind. But of an end to their argument, we shall have none, not ever, until the end of all.

Catherynne M. Valente

A lie told in the service of truth is virtue.

Brent Weeks

From the days of old, those who walk in the way have replaced those who deviate therefrom; those who lack virtue have fallen before those who possess it. Can one escape fate?

Luo Guanzhong

Pacifism is a virtue indistinguishable from cowardice.

Brent Weeks

When your heart flows broad and full like a river, a blessing and a danger to those living near: there is the origin of your virtue.When you are above praise and blame, and your will wants to command all things, like a lover's will: there is the origin of your virtue.When you despise the agreeable and the soft bed and cannot bed yourself far enough from the soft: there is the origin of your virtue.When you will with a single will and you call this cessation of all need "necessity": there is the origin of your virtue.Verily, a new good and evil is she. Verily, a new deep murmur and the voice of a new well!Power is she, this new virtue; a dominant thought is she, and around her a wise soul: a golden sun, and around it the serpent of knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?

Gordon R. Dickson

The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn't it?

Kevin Dutton

I really believe," said Wanda thoughtfully,"that your madness is nothing but a demonic, unsatisfied sensuality. Our unnatural way of life must generate such illnesses. Were you less virtuous, you would be completely sane.

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Success is not worth rejoicing over, failure is not worth grieving over.

Luo Guanzhong

Victory and defeat are but ordinary events in a soldier's career, and why should you give up?

Luo Guanzhong

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

Thomas Jefferson

Virtue makes for a cold bed.

Ava Zavora

Warriors, warriors we call ourselves. We fight for splendid virtue, for high endeavor, for sublime wisdom, therefore we call ourselves warriors.

Aunguttara Nikaya

Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.

Ruth Fulton Benedict

There is no virtue or vice in a transitive verb, everything depends on the direct object. 'I LOVE' could be virtuous or not - you could love ice cream, Jesus, child porn, my country, hurting people, the lust of the flesh. Love is not an automatic virtue. Hatred is not an automatic vice. What's the direct object? from Debate In The Age Of The Glitter-Bomb in The City, Fall 2013.

Douglas Wilson

The smug mask of virtue triumphant could be almost as horrible as the face of wickedness revealed.

Terry Pratchett

A truly virtuous man would come to the aid of the most distant stranger as quickly as to his own friend. If men were perfectly virtuous, they wouldn’t have friends.

Montesquieu

Vice is nice, but a little virtue won't hurt you.

Edward Gorey

Don't be led astray into the paths of virtue.

Oscar Wilde

The virtue of its Citizens is the only Support of a Republican government

William Henry Harrison

Neeta showed us there can be as much virtue in the things we do not do as on those we do.

Anne Fortier

That she had loved Sylveste because he was such a self-important bastard and made something noble of being a self-important bastard, did it with such utter aplomb that it became a kind of virtue, like the wearing of sackcloth

Alastair Reynolds

They think virtues are man-made, only exist because they exist, but if no human had ever existed, The Virtues would persist for they hold their being from the very Presence of the Adversary Himself.

Geoffrey Wood

We’ve spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that’s precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

Geoffrey Wood

What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude

Truman Capote

No action can be virtuous unless it is freely chosen.

Murray N. Rothbard

To be moral, an act must be free.

Murray N. Rothbard

Virtue in a woman is like pepper in the soup. A little makes for a nice seasoning. Butoverdo it, and no one wants very much of you.

Lisa Kleypas

You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In this world of sin and sorrow if virtue triumphs over vice it is not because it is virtuous, but because it has better and bigger guns; if honesty prevails over double-dealing, it is not because it is honest, but because it has a stronger army more ably led; and if good overcomes evil it is not because it is good, but because it has a well-lined purse. It is well to have right on our side, but it madness to forget that unless we have might as well it will avail us nothing. We must believe that God loves men of good will, but there is no evidence to show that He will save fools from the result of their folly.

W Somerset Maugham

To be strong and true had been the most important task he had set himself since early childhood.Once, as a boy, he had tried to outstare the sun. But before he could tell whether he had really looked at it or not, changes had occurred: the blazing red ball that had been there at first began to whirl, then suddenly dimmed, till it became a cold, bluish-black, flattened disk of iron. He felt he had seen the very essence of the sun.... For a while, wherever he looked he saw the sun's pale afterimage: in the undergrowth; in the shade beneath the trees; even, when he gazed up, in every part of the sky. The truth was something too dazzling to be looked at directly. And yet, once it had come into one's field of vision, one saw patches of light in all kinds of places: the afterimages of virtue.

Yukio Mishima

Everything we do in life reflects through the virtues of a nation. For example if a nation is ruled through Fear, the Manifestation of War rises; If a nation is ruled through Love, War would not exist and Harmony would find its way.

Nynke Visser

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

Robert Ardrey

The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch's. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I'm telling you. Gus didn't think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa's old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They'd elevate small grievances; they'd cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue.

Amy Bloom

What we're fighting against isn't an out-and-out vice. It's an overgrown, perverted virtue.

Jared Taylor

Virtue became less the harsh and martial self-sacrifice of antiquity and more the modern willingness to get along with others for the sake of peace and prosperity.

Gordon S. Wood

But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to bring forth generations of new life.This I was, and envying a kettle.

Richard Llewellyn

If we can spend more time uprooting vices and rooting virtues, our world will be safer and better.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

The beauty and music...It is a call...And some are not strong.

Richard Llewellyn

If a nation succeeds in making her people strong in virtues, then the nation is rich already.

Sunday Adelaja

People who don't like cats always seem to think there is some peculiar virtue in not liking them.

L.M. Montgomery

She would grace his home with her charm and beauty and she would make his bed joyous, all without ever having to shame his hearth with another man's memory of her shamelessness.

Dorothy West

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.

John Milton

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than they sphery chime; Or if virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.

John Milton

Such is the joy of concluding a day performing duties earnestly leaving ends upon His feet! I have nothing to gain here except virtues, nothing to lose except love, O Lord, I am here to breathe the beauty of life!

Preeth Nambiar

Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor? Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor.

Jerome K. Jerome

Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.

Ayn Rand

I have pondered on the causes of a life's shipwreck. I think that our lives are worse than the mind's quality would warrant. There are many who know virtue. We know the good, we apprehend it clearly. But we can't bring it to achievement.

Euripides

It was inevitable under a monarchy, however benevolent the monarch. The old virtues disappear. Independence and frankness are at a discount. Complacent anticipation of the monarch's wishes is then the greatest of all virtues. One must either be a good monarch like yourself, or a good courtier like myself—either an Emperor or an idiot.

Robert Graves

PRESCRIPTION A bitof virtuewill neverhurt you.

Piet Hein

You can fake virtue for an audience. You can’t fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running.

Ayn Rand

It is not our religion, still less the colour of our skin, that produces virtue; virtue must be practised. Therefore, let no one do to others what he would not have done to himself.

Yagnavalkya

...those who deny or oppose these so pleasant delights (of virtue), do so only from jealousy, you may be sure, from the barbarous pleasure of making others as guilty and unhappy as they are. They are blind and would like everyone to be the same, they are mistaken, and would like everyone else to be mistaken; but if you could see into the depths of their hearts you would find only sorrow and repentance; all these apostles of crime are only evil and desperate people; you would not find a sincere person among them who would not admit, if he were truthful, that their poisonous words or dangerous writings had not been guided only by their passions. And what man in fact can say in cold blood that the bases of morality can be shaken without risk? What being would dare maintain that doing good and desiring good are not essentially the aim of mankind? And how can a man who will do only evil expect to be happy in a society whose strongest concern is the perpetual increase of good? But will not this apologist of crime not shudder himself when he had uprooted from all hearts the only thing which could lead to his conversion? What will stop his servants ruining him, if they have ceased to be virtuous?

Marquis de Sade

The virtue of a man ought to be measured not by his extraordinary exertions, but by his every-day conduct.

Blaise Pascal

Never sacrifice what’s right for what’s convenient.

Matshona Dhliwayo

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Virtue Quotes - Page 2

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