Virtue Quotes

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler, 1653

Virtue is its own punishment.

Aneurin Bevan

The love of money is the root of all virtue.

George Bernard Shaw

Just as treasures are uncovered from the earth, so virtue appears from good deeds, and wisdom appears from a pure and peaceful mind. To walk safely through the maze of human life, one needs the light of wisdom and the guidance of virtue.

Buddha

Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections. For love which hath ends, will have an end; whereas that which is founded on true virtue, will always continue.

John Dryden

Happiness is the highest good, being a realization and perfect practice of virtue, which some can attain, while others have little or none of it...

Aristotle

Self - Denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.

Oscar Wilde

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Cicero

No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

C. C. Colton

The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

One path alone leads to a life of peace The path of virtue.

Juvenal

One path alone leads to a life of peace: The path of virtue.

Juvenal

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Voltaire

To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue... They are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought.

Victor Hugo

One ought to seek out virtue for its own sake, without being influenced by fear or hope, or by any external influence. Moreover, that in that does happiness consist.

Diogenes Laertius, Zeno

True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.

Whitheead

If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in first, you get accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never had.

I. F. Stone

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Natural ability without education has more often attained to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Cicero

Certainly virtue is like precious odors, most fragrant when they are incensed, or crushed for prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

Francis Bacon

If by saying that all men are born free and equal, you mean that they are all equally born; it is true, but true in no other sense; birth, talent, labor, virtue, and providence, are forever making differences.

Eugene Edwards

There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

Mary Bertone

Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.

Ludwig van Beethoven

Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.

Brendan Francis Behan

If virtue precede us every step will be safe.

Seneca

Knowledge, without common sense, says Lee, is folly; without method, it is waste; without kindness, it is fanaticism; without religion, it is death. But with common sense, it is wisdom with method, it is power; with clarity, it is beneficence; with religion, it is virtue, and life, and peace.

Austin Farra

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Abraham Lincoln

First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.

Greek Prove

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at.

Sterne

Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.

Hugh Prathe

Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

Virtue is praised but hated. People run away from it, for it is ice - Cold and in this world you must keep your feet warm.

Denis Diderot