Virtue Quotes
Often the wicked prosper, while the righteous starve; yet I would never exchange my state for theirs, my virtue for their gold. For mine endures, while riches change their owner every day.
Solon
Souls that have lived in virtue are in general happy, and when separated from the irrational part of their nature, and made clean from all matter, have communion with the gods and join them in the governing of the whole world. Yet even if none of this happiness fell to their lot, virtue itself, and the joy and glory of virtue, and the life that is subject to no grief and no master are enough to make happy those who have set themselves to live according to virtue and have achieved it.
Sallust
When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.
William Bennett
Sin, that amends, is but patched with virtue.
William Shakespeare
To live a life of virtue, you have to become consistent, even when it isn't convenient, comfortable, or easy.
Epictetus
The habit of virtue cannot be formed in a closet. Habits are formed by acts of reason in a persevering struggle through temptation.
Bernard Gilpin
Discourse on virtue and they pass by in droves. Whistle and dance the shimmy, and you've got an audience.
Diogenes
I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them.
Virginia Woolf
But although the attractive virtue of the earth extends upwards, as has been said, so very far, yet if any stone should be at a distance great enough to become sensible compared with the earth's diameter, it is true that on the motion of the earth such a stone would not follow altogether; its own force of resistance would be combined with the attractive force of the earth, and thus it would extricate itself in some degree from the motion of the earth.
Johannes Kepler
For youthful faults ripe virtues shall atone.
William Wordsworth
Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.
Thomas Carlyle
Well, but you affirm that virtue is only elicited by temptation; - and you think that a woman cannot be too little exposed to temptation, or too little acquainted with vice, or anything connected therewith - It must be, either, that you think she is essentially so vicious, or so feeble-minded that she cannot withstand temptation, - and though she may be pure and innocent as long as she is kept in ignorance and restraint, yet, being destitute of real virtue, to teach her how to sin is at once to make her a sinner.
Anne Bronte
