Virtue Quotes
-
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
-
And it is you, spirit--with will and energy, and virtue and purity--that I want, not alone with your brittle frame.
Charlotte Bronte
-
Virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.
Aristotle
-
It is the way of the superior man to prefer the concealment of his virtue, while it daily becomes more illustrious, and it is the way of the mean man to seek notoriety, while he daily goes more and more to ruin.
Confucius
-
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
George Eliot
-
He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it.
Confucius
-
The glory of riches and of beauty is frail and transitory; virtue remains bright and eternal.
Sallust
-
At a time when pimpery, lick-spittlery, and picking the public's pocket are the order of the day - indeed, officially proclaimed as virtue - the poet must play the madcap to keep his balance. And ours.
Studs Terkel
-
I have a tendency, after a play of mine is produced, to look back on it disparagingly, seeing only its faults; before production, I see only its virtues.
William Inge
-
[W]hen the empirical investigator glories in his refusal to go beyond the specialized observation dictated by the traditions of his discipline, be they ever so inclusive, he is making a virtue out of a defense mechanism which insures him against questioning his presuppositions.
Karl Mannheim
-
The tools are evolving, and people's interests are evolving as well. So, suddenly people like to hear bands, people like Devendra Banhart or the xx, bands that make a kind of virtue of sloppiness. That isn't what they would describe what they're doing, but the fact is they make a virtue of the sort of hand-made nature of what they're doing.
Brian Eno
Roxy Music
-
Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.
Aristotle
-
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
Paul Kalanithi
-
The hero draws inspiration from the virtue of his ancestors.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
-
Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.
Aristotle
