Virtue Quotes

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

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

George Sand

He lives in fame that died in virtue's cause.

William Shakespeare

Like love, like talent, like any other virtue, like anything else in this life, happiness needs to be nurtured - this is the truth of the whole matter.

Ogwo David Emenike

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it's the surrender of reason, it's the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It's our need to believe and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. ... Out of all the virtues, all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated

Christopher Hitchens

We set no special value on the possession of a virtue until we percieve that it is entirely lacking in our adversary.

Friedrich Nietzsche

When virtue has slept it will arise more vigorous.

Friedrich Nietzsche

A prince must be prudent enough to know how to escape the bad reputation of those vices that would lose the state for him, and must protect himself from those that will not lose it for him, if this is possible; but if he cannot, he need not concern himself unduly if he ignores these less serious vices.

Niccolo Machiavelli

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

Niccolo Machiavelli

Here am I: at one stroke incestuous, adulteress, sodomite, and all that in a girl who only lost her maidenhead today! What progress, my friends... with what rapidity I advance along the thorny road of vice!

Marquis de Sade

Ah, Eug?nie, have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of the pleasures one tastes in outraging them?

Marquis de Sade

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

Stephen Vizinczey

No people can be great who have ceased to be virtuous

Samuel Johnson

To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.

William Penn

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man.

Thomas Jefferson

So may the outward shows be least themselves:The world is still deceived with ornament.In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,Obscures the show of evil? In religion,What damned error, but some sober browWill bless it and approve it with a text,Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?There is no vice so simple but assumesSome mark of virtue on his outward parts.

William Shakespeare

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

Victor Hugo

It is easy enough to be virtuous When nothing tempts you to stray; When without or within No voice of sin Is luring your soul away. But it is only a negative virtue until it is tried by fire. For the soul that is worth the treasures of the earth is the soul that resists desire.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Assume a virtue if you have it not.

William Shakespeare

If we had to seek virtue outside of ourselves, that would assuredly be difficult; but as it is within us, it suffices to avoid bad thoughts and to keep our souls turned toward the Lord.

Philokalia