Virtue Quotes

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

Jonathan Swift

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

William Hazlitt

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

The vices of some men are magnificent.

Charles Lamb

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.

Carl Gustav Jung

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.

Elizabeth Blackwell

No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice.

Marcel Proust

Life is extraordinarily suave and sweet with certain natural, witty, affectionate people who have unusual distinction and are capable of every vice, but who make a display of none in public and about whom no one can affirm they have a single one. There is something supple and secret about them. Besides, their perversity gives spice to their most innocent occupations, such as taking a walk in the garden at night.

Marcel Proust

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

John Milton

Virtue that wavers is not virtue.

John Milton

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

John Kenneth Galbraith

When you can't have anything else, you can have virtue.

Don Marquis

Virtue is the only true nobility.

Thomas Fuller

Vice knows that she is ugly, so she puts on her mask.

Benjamin Franklin

Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy.

Benjamin Franklin

Often devotion to virtue arises from sated desire.

Laurence Hope Nicolson

The power of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doing

Blaise Pascal

The highest virtue found in the tropics is chastity, and in the colder regions, temperance.

Christian Nevell Bovee

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Virtue is its own reward.

Marcus Tullius Cicero