Virtue Quotes
Why not simply honor your parents, love your children, help your brothers and sisters, be faithful to your friends, care for your mate with devotion, complete your work cooperatively and joyfully, assume responsibility for problems, practice virtue without first demanding it of others, understand the highest truths yet retain an ordinary manner? That would be true clarity, true simplicity, true mastery.
Lao Tzu
I find myself feeling like Oscar in 'Sweat' just by virtue of cleaning the tables, wiping the bar down and picking up everybody's glasses - and not making eye contact, because that's the character. These are working-class, blue-collar people. These are the people I grew up with. It gets under your skin.
Carlo Alban
Novels are completed when they are finished, but the memoir changes its own conclusion by virtue of being written... I was not at all the same person, when I handed the manuscript to the publisher, as I had been when I began. A memoir may always be retrospective, but the past is not where its action takes place.
Nuala O'Faolain
The soul is perfected by knowledge and virtue.
Thomas Aquinas
By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy-indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.
William Osler
Valor would cease to be a virtue, if there were no injustice.
Agesilaus II
The best perfection of a religious man is to do common things in a perfect manner. A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue.
Bonaventure
There is probably not one person, however great his virtue, who cannot be led by the complexities of life's circumstances to a familiarity with the vices he condemns the most vehemently – without his completely recognizing this vice which, disguised as certain events, touches him and wounds him: strange words, an inexplicable attitude, on a given night, of the person whom he otherwise has so many reasons to love.
Marcel Proust
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
William Hazlitt
Thoroughly convinced of the impossibility of his own suit, a high resolve constrained him not to injure that of another. This is a lover's most stoical virtue, as the lack of it is a lover's most venial sin.
Thomas Hardy
It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honorable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues. We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber.
Seneca the Younger
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
William Hazlitt
Humility is the mother of all virtues. Humility says we are not in control, principles are in control, therefore we submit ourselves to principles. Pride says that we are in control, and since our values govern our behavior, we can simply do life our way.
Stephen Covey
So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.
Charles Dickens
We document, explain, justify, construct, organize: these are good things, but we do not succeed in coming to the whole. But we may as well calm down: construction is not absolute. Our virtue is this: by cultivating the exact we have laid the foundations for a science of art, including the unknown X.
Paul Klee
Vanity calculates but poorly on the vanity of others; what a virtue we should distil from frailty, what a world of pain we should save our brethren, if we would suffer our own weakness to be the measure of theirs.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Gratitude is not a virtue I believe in, and to me it seems hypocritical to expect it from a child.
Hermann Hesse
I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores.
Moliere
