Virtue Quotes

Sir francis bacon - certainly virtue is like precious odors, most...
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Address on The Method of Nature, 1841
There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent and virtue.
Tom Robbins
Recommend virtue to your children it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Mary wollstonecraft shelley - virtue can only flourish among equals....
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
Blushing is the color of virtue.
Laertius Diogenes
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all 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
That man is good who does good to others if he suffers on account of the good he does, he is very good if he suffers at the hands of those to whom he has done good, then his goodness is so great that it could be enhanced only by greater sufferings and if he should die at their hands, his virtue can go no further it is heroic, it is perfect.
La Bruyere
Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
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
Voltaire - it is one of the superstitions of the human mind...
Virtue is more to man than either water or fire. I have seen men die from treading on water and fire, but I have never seen a man die from treading the course of virtue.
Confucius, The Confucian Analects
First secure an independent income, then practice virtue.
Greek Prove
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Sir Winston Churchill
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
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
The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus
Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
Virtue extends our days: he live two lives who relives his past with pleasure.
Marcus Valerius Martialis, Epigrams
If thou desire to purchase honor with thy wealth, consider first how that wealth became thine; if thy labor got it, let thy wisdom keep it; if oppression found it, let repentance restore it; if thy parent left it, let thy virtues deserve it; so shall thy honor be safer, better and cheaper.
Francis Quarles
Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Thomas Hobbes, quoted from "Oxygen3, Panda Software
One path alone leads to a life of peace The path of virtue.
Juvenal
Morality, taken as apart from religion, is but another name for decency in sin. It is just that negative species of virtue which consists in not doing what is scandalously depraved and wicked. But there is no heart of holy principle in it, any more than there is in the grosser sin.
Horace Bushnell
The highest endeavor of the mind, and the highest virtue, is to understand things by intuition.
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics
What is a weed A plant whose virtues have never been discovered.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is no being of any race who, if he finds the proper guide, cannot attain to virtue.
Cicero
Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.
Horace, Epistles
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Ursula Le Guin
Most institutions demand unqualified faith; but the institution of science makes skepticism a virtue.
Robert K. Merton
There are men whom a happy disposition, a strong desire of glory and esteem, inspire with the same love for justice and virtue which men in general have for riches and honors.... But the number of these men is so small that I only mention them in honor of humanity.
Claude Adrien Helvetius
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Rene Descartes
A thankful heart is not only the greatest virtue, but the parent of all other virtues.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness.
Confucius
Without courage you cannot practice any of the other virtues.
Maya Angelou
Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.
John Kenneth Galbraith
The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.
Plutarch, Morals