Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
~By George Bernard Shaw ~
However great an evil immorality may be, we must not forget that it is not without its beneficial consequences. It is only through extremes that men can arrive at the middle path of wisdom and virtue.
~By Wilhelm von Humboldt ~
If a woman possesses manly virtues one should run away from her; and if she does not possess them she runs away from herself.
~By Friedrich Nietzsche ~
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
~By Aristotle ~
You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
~By Louisa May Alcott ~
Not to be cheered by praise, not to be grieved by blame, but to know thoroughly one's own virtues or powers are the characteristics of an excellent man.
~By Satchel Paige ~
Silence is the virtue of fools.
~By Francis Bacon ~
To realize that you do not understand is a virtue; Not to realize that you do not understand is a defect.
~By Lao Tzu ~
Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
~By Ezra Pound ~
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.
~By Voltaire ~
It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
Tenderness is a virtue.
~By Oliver Goldsmith ~
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.
~By Robert E. Howard ~
When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven, and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.
~By Akhenaton ~
Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues.
~By John Keegan ~
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
~By Baruch Spinoza ~
I am and have always been a strong proponent of public education. But by the virtue of its very nature - publicly funded schools cannot offer the type of spiritual education that Catholic schools have long provided.
~By Mark Foley ~
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
~By Gilbert K. Chesterton ~
Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.
~By Ira Gershwin ~
Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue.
~By Lord Chesterfield ~
Beauty is but the sensible image of the Infinite. Like truth and justice it lives within us; like virtue and the moral law it is a companion of the soul.
~By George Bancroft ~
Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edges rock of poverty.
~By Eugene Sue ~
Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.
~By William Shakespeare ~
The virtues of science are skepticism and independence of thought.
~By Walter Gilbert ~
Common tyrants, and public oppressors, are not intitled to obedience from their subjects, by virtue of any thing here laid down by the inspired apostle.
~By Jonathan Mayhew ~
We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
~By Lucius Annaeus Seneca ~
In a state therefore of great equality and virtue, where pure and simple manners prevailed, the increase of the human species would evidently be much greater than any increase that has been hitherto known.
~By Thomas Malthus ~
The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.
~By Arnold J. Toynbee ~
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
~By Jerome K. Jerome ~
Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves - so how can we know anyone else?
~By Sydney J. Harris ~
The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.
~By George A. Smith ~
Capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.
~By Joseph A. Schumpeter ~
I have pushed virtue to outright brutality.
~By Jean Racine ~
Solitude cherishes great virtues and destroys little ones.
~By Sydney Smith ~
The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
~By Larry Wall ~
Each must in virtue strive for to excel; That man lives twice that lives the first life well.
~By Robert Herrick ~
Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
~By Thomas Paine ~
Virtue is the fount whence honour springs.
~By Christopher Marlowe ~
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
~By Voltaire ~
My parents had always preached the virtues of hard work. But hard work is one thing; economic struggle is another.
~By Sargent Shriver ~
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
~By Moliere ~
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
~By Nikola Tesla ~
Virtue looks good but it only suits imposing figures.
~By Frank Wedekind ~
A laugh costs too much when bought at the expense of virtue.
~By Marcus Fabius Quintilian ~
Affliction is the wholesome soil of virtue, where patience, honor, sweet humility, and calm fortitude, take root and strongly flourish.
~By David Mallet ~
Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.
~By Sidney Lanier ~
I became startled by the extraordinary difference between something whose surface is completely invisible which only makes itself present by virtue of what it reflects, and a window, which doesn't make itself apparent at all, in the ideal case.
~By Jonathan Miller ~
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
~By Aristotle ~
Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
~By Barry Goldwater ~
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.
~By Saint Augustine ~
A country cannot subsist well without liberty, nor liberty without virtue.
~By Daniel Webster ~
Britain, which in the years immediately before this war was rapidly losing such democratic virtues as it possessed, is now being bombed and burned into democracy.
~By J. B. Priestley ~
One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real.
~By Klaus Kinski ~
It is the hour to be drunken! to escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.
~By Charles Baudelaire ~
There is a measure needing courage to adopt and enforce it, which I believe to be of virtue sufficient to redeem the nation in this its darkest hour: one only; I know of no other to which we may rationally trust for relief from impending dangers without and within.
~By Robert Dale Owen ~
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.
~By Claud-Adrian Helvetius ~
Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.
~By James Thurber ~
We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
~By Denis Diderot ~
He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
~By Winston Churchill ~
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
~By Barry Goldwater ~
Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?
~By Edgar Rice Burroghs ~
Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.
~By Francois de La Rochefoucauld ~
Honor is the reward of virtue.
~By Marcus Tullius Cicero ~
God has been very good to me, for I never dwell upon anything wrong which a person has done, so as to remember it afterwards. If I do remember it, I always see some other virtue in that person.
~By Saint Teresa of Avila ~
Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.
~By Andrew Jackson ~
In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life.
~By J. M. Coetzee ~
Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.
~By Ludwig van Beethoven ~
Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.
~By Thomas Carlyle ~
Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.
~By Emil Ludwig ~
Self-respect is the cornerstone of all virtue.
~By John Herschel ~
What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.
~By Voltaire ~
Faith is the virtue by which, clinging-to the faithfulness of God, we lean upon him, so that we may obtain what he gives to us.
~By William Ames ~
The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.
~By Jawaharlal Nehru ~
Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.
~By Napoleon Bonaparte ~
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
~By Alfred Marshall ~
The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.
~By Quintilian ~
Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.
~By Mary Wollstonecraft ~
In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.
~By James Q. Wilson ~
If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.
~By Moliere ~
I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature, to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.
~By Samuel Johnson ~
When one ceases from conflict, whether because he has won, because he has lost, or because he cares no more for the game, the virtue passes out of him.
~By Charles Horton Cooley ~
Our failings sometimes bind us to one another as closely as could virtue itself.
~By Marquis De Vauvenargues ~
The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.
~By Confucius ~
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
~By George Washington ~
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
~By Abraham Lincoln ~
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
~By Quentin Crisp ~
If you wish to be loved, show more of your faults than your virtues.
~By Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton ~
When we think of the ideal, we do not add virtue to virtue, but think of Jesus Christ, so that the standard of human life is no longer a code, but a character.
~By E. Stanley Jones ~
The day has gone by into the dim vista of the past when idleness was considered a virtue in woman.
~By Caroline A. Huling ~
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
~By Gore Vidal ~
The deadliest foe to virtue would be complete self-knowledge.
~By F. H. Bradley ~
The word of God is full of sad and grave counsel, full of the knowledge of God, of examples of virtues, and of correction of vices, of the end of this life, and of the life to come.
~By John Jewel ~
Where the roots of private virtue are diseased, the fruit of public probity cannot but be corrupt.
~By Felix Adler ~
The virtues are lost in self-interest as rivers are lost in the sea.
~By Franklin D. Roosevelt ~
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
~By Alex Comfort ~
Reputation is rarely proportioned to virtue.
~By Saint Francis de Sales ~
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.
~By Saskya Pandita ~
Ambition, in a private man is a vice, is in a prince the virtue.
~By Philip Massinger ~
Hypocrisy is not generally a social sin, but a virtue.
~By Judith Martin ~
|