Virtue Quotes

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.

Secrecy is the element of all goodness; even virtue, even beauty is mysterious.

Even virtue is fairer when it appears in a beautiful person.

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

Virtue herself is her own fairest reward.

Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.

Dr. Johnson has said that the chief glory of a country arises from its authors. But then that is only as they are oracles of wisdom; unless they teach virtue, they are more worthy of a halter than of the laurel.

To practice five things under all circumstances constitutes perfect virtue; these five are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

The virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

Peace is the virtue of civilization. War is its crime.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

Virtue looks good but it only suits imposing figures.

Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.

The better one is morally the less aware they are of their virtue.

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.

For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

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

Ambition, in a private man is a vice, is in a prince the virtue.

What is man's ultimate direction in life? It is to look for love, truth, virtue, and beauty.

Each must in virtue strive for to excel; That man lives twice that lives the first life well.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.

Peace is not the absence of war, but a virtue based on strength of character.

Many have said of Alchemy, that it is for the making of gold and silver. For me such is not the aim, but to consider only what virtue and power may lie in medicines.

It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.