quotations about virtue
Our virtues are usually just vices in disguise.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
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Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Both excess and defect are alike prejudicial to moral virtue.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
They that are virtuous from principle may receive confidence in every capacity; but they that are so from custom or habit, are capable of trust only in matters of ordinary and settled occurrence.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
It turns out that being "a paragon of big-banker virtue" is not at all the same as being a virtuous human being.
JIM HIGHTOWER
"How can we stop banksters from robbing us?", Illinois Times, April 20, 2017
God hath not called us that we should be unclean, but holy and virtuous.
THOMAS BECON
Writings of the Rev. Thomas Becon
Virtue is the effort, the conquest of a difficulty, leaving, as its results, a balance of happiness. There may be, there is much good in the world, which no virtue has been concerned in producing. But there is no virtue where there is no balance of happiness.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Deontology; or, The Science of Morality
The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Any one may yield to temptation, and yet feel a sincere love and aspiration after virtue; but he who maintains vice in theory, has not even the idea or capacity for virtue in his mind. Men err: fiends only mock at goodness.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Freedom that rejects virtue is really enslavement. Freedom from virtue is self-defeating, no matter how appealing it may appear when it is marketed.
DONALD DEMARCO
"A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Culture", National Catholic Register, April 22, 2017
Virtue is always in progress and yet always starts from the beginning. It is always in progress because, considered objectively, it is an ideal and unattainable, while yet constant approximation to it is a duty.
IMMANUEL KANT
Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals
If it be usual to be strongly impressed by things that are scarce, why are we so little impressed by virtue?
JEAN DE LA BRUYÈRE
"Of Personal Merit", Les Caractères
Without virtue it is difficult to bear gracefully the honors of fortune.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
We look around us ... we find that we exist, we find ourselves reasoning upon the mystery which involves our being ... we see virtue and vice, we see the light and darkness, each is separate, distinct; the line which divides them is glaringly perceptible; yet how racking it is to the soul, when enquiring into its own operations, to find that perfect virtue is very far from attainable, to find reason tainted by feeling, to see the mind when analysed exhibit a picture of irreconcilable inconsistencies, even when perhaps a moment before, it imagined that it had grasped the fleeting Phantom of virtue.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
letter to Elizabeth Hitchener, June 20, 1811
Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
OSAMU DAZAI
No Longer Human
They have made Virtue also a goddess, which, indeed, if it could be a goddess, had been preferable to many. And now, because it is not a goddess, but a gift of God, let it be obtained by prayer from Him, by whom alone it can be given, and the whole crowd of false gods vanishes.
ST. AUGUSTINE
The City of God
If there's a power above us,
(And that there is all nature cries aloud
Through all her works) he must delight in virtue.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
Some people have an idea that virtue exists only where the blood is cold.
LEWIS F. KORNS
Thoughts
If no action is to be deemed virtuous for which malice can imagine a sinister motive, then there never was a virtuous action; no, not even in the life of our Saviour Himself. But He has taught us to judge the tree by its fruit, and to leave motives to Him who can alone see into them.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Martin Van Buren, June 29, 1824