Virtues Quotes
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And inasmuch as the great-souled man deserves most, he must be the best of men; for the better a man is the more he deserves, and he that is best deserves most. Therefore the truly great-souled man must be a good man. Indeed greatness in each of the virtues would seem to go with greatness of soul.
Aristotle
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One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.
Blaise Pascal
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Le bonheur engloutit nos forces, comme le malheur e teint nos vertus. Happiness engulfs our strength, just as misfortune extinguishes our virtues.
Honore de Balzac
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Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
George Eliot
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The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.
John Calvin
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It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.
Jonathan Swift
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Virtues are formed by prayer. Prayer preserves temperance. Prayer suppresses anger. Prayer prevents emotions of pride and envy. Prayer draws into the soul the Holy Spirit, and raises man to Heaven.
Ephrem the Syrian
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Even if I could, I would not exahnge their virtues for my own. And that is why they are intent on learning from me.
Confucius
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Man hazards the condition and loses the virtues of a freeman, in proportion as he accustoms his thoughts to view without anguish or shame, his lapse into the bondage of debtor.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
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Only have enough of little virtues and common fidelities, and you need not mourn because you are neither a hero nor a saint.
Henry Ward Beecher
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Wine rejoices the heart of man and joy is the mother of all virtues.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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The more I think of a people calmly developing, in regions excluded from our sight and deemed uninhabitable by our sages, powers surpassing our most disciplined modes of force, and virtues to which our life, social and political, becomes antagonistic in proportion as our civilisation advances - the more devoutly I pray that ages may yet elapse before there emerge into sunlight our inevitable destroyers.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton