Virtue Quotes

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

Ludwig van Beethoven

Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.

Ruth Fulton Benedict

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

Nikola Tesla

We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a great distance, not by virtue of any sight on our part, or any physical distinction, but because we are carried high and raised up by their giant size.

Bernard of Chartres, 12th Century

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

George Washington

Compulsion cannot produce virtue; it can only produce the outward semblance of virtue.

Dinesh D? Souza

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

Aristotle, Rhetoric

The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts, therefore guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue, and reasonable nature.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

Men are equal it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

Voltaire

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

Sir Francis Bacon, Of Adversity

The great virtue of my radicalism lies in the fact that I am perfectly ready, if necessary, to be radical on the conservative side.

Theodore Roosevelt

Virtue does not always demand a heavy sacrifice only the willingness to make it when necessary.

Frederick Sherwood Dunn

What men call good fellowship is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter which lie close together to keep each other warm.

Henry David Thoreau

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Sir Winston Churchill

Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues.

Maya Angelou

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Horace, Epistles

Hope is both the earliest and the most indispensable virtue inherent in the state of being alive. If life is to be sustained hope must remain, even where confidence is wounded, trust impaired.

Erik H. Erikson

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

Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.

William Golding

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 Confucian Analects

All government - - Indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act - - Is founded on compromise and barter.

Edmund Burke, Speech on the Conciliation of America

Not to be cheered by praise, Not to be grieved by blame, But to know thoroughly ones own virtues or powers Are the characteristics of an excellent man.

Saskya Pandita

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

First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.

Greek Prove

God gives to every man virtue, temper, and understanding.

William Coope

Courage and modesty are the most unequivocal of virtues, for they are of a kind that hypocrisy cannot imitate they too have this quality in common, that they are expressed by the same color.

Johann von Goethe

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

Confucius

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

Virtue extends our days he live two lives who relives his past with pleasure.

Marcus Valerius Martialis

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men... the master of superstition is the people and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order.

Francis Bacon

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

Sterne

Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and life.

Henri - Fr? d? ric Amiel

Jenny replied to this with a bitterness which might have surprized a judicious person, who had observed the tranquillity with which she bore all the affronts to her chastity; but her patience was perhaps tired out, for this is a virtue which is very apt to be fatigued by exercise.

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.

David Starr Jordan, The Philosophy of Despai

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

Abraham Lincoln

And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.

John Dryden, Imitation of Horace

There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Thomas Jefferson

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

Mark Twain