Virtue Quotes

If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love- You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.

C.S. Lewis

A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Aristotle

I desire Virtue, though I love her not-I have no faith in her when she is got:I fear that she will bind and make me slaveAnd send me songless to the sullen grave.

Anna Wickham, SelfAnalysis in Co

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.

Don Marquis, The Almost Perfect

Virtue is not the absense of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate ting, like pain or a particular smell.

G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Tri

Nature does not loathe virtue: it is unaware of its existence.

Fran, A Letter to Myself

The vices we scoff at in others, laugh at us within ourselves.

Thomas Edward Brown

Most vices demand considerable self-sacrifices. There is no greater mistake than to suppose that a vicious life is a life of uninterrupted pleasure. It is a life almost as wearisome and painful -- if strenuously led -- as Christian's in The Pilgrim's Progress.

Aldous Huxley

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

George Bernard Shaw

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

Silius Italicus, Punica

Virtue is like health: the harmony of the whole man.

Thomas Carlyle

Every good quality runs into a defect; economy borders on avarice, the generous are not far from the prodigal, the brave man is close to the bully; he who is very pious is slightly sanctimonious; there are just as many vices to virtue as there are holes in the mantle of Diogenes.

Victor Hugo

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

Sir Winston Churchill

To be proud of virtue, is to poison yourself with the Antidote.

Benjamin Franklin

The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.

Samuel Johnson

Virtue is too often merely local.

Samuel Johnson

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?

George Eliot

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterately dishonest that theft is to them a master passion. When a human being has reached that stage, there is only one course that can be rationally pursued. Sorrowfully, but remorselessly, it must be recognized that he has become lunatic, morally demented, incapable of self-government, and that upon him, therefore, must be passed the sentence of permanent seclusion from a world in which he is not fit to be at large.

William Booth