quotations about virtue
Virtue alone has majesty in death.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Virtue always meets reward,
But quicker when it wears a sword.
BRET HARTE
"The Legends of the Rhine"
When we let our virtue shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
JOE EVERETT
"Creating men of virtue", The Observer, April 20, 2017
Not beauty, no, but virtue rais'd my fires, whose sacred flame did cherish chaste desires.
SIR WILLIAM ALEXANDER
Aurora
Happiness and Virtue clasp hands and walk together.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
There is no road or ready way to virtue.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
The safeguards of virtue are hateful to the evil disposed.
AESOP
"The Thieves and the Cock", Aesop's Fables
Our virtues themselves are not free and floating qualities over which we retain a permanent control and power of disposal; they come to be so closely linked in our minds with the actions in conjunction with which we have made it our duty to exercise them that if we come to engage in an activity of a different kind, it catches us off guard and without the slightest awareness that it might involve the application of those same virtues.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
If one doth act in friendly wise,
With no evil thought toward any single creature,
And in so doing becometh proper,
And if he have compassion in his soul
Toward all living beings--this noble one
Doth acquire abundant Virtue.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
Virtue and vice are the only things in this world, which, with our souls, are capable of surviving death; the former is the rational and only procuring cause of all intellectual happiness, and the latter of conscious guilt and misery; and therefore, our indispensable duty and ultimate interest is, to love, cultivate and improve the one, as the means of our greatest good, and to hate and abstain from the other, as productive of our greatest evil.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
To Virtue's humblest son let none prefer
Vice, tho' descended from the Conqueror.
EDWARD YOUNG
Love of Fame: The Universal Passion in Seven Characteristical Satires
To be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations. If thou hast not conquer'd thyself in that which is thy own particular weakness, thou hast no title to virtue, tho' thou art free of other men's.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Most of our virtues are gouty from lack of exercise.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
There is nothing we abhor so much as to have to be virtuous in private.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
There is but one pursuit in life which it is in the power of all to follow, and of all to attain. It is subject to no disappointments, since he that perseveres, makes every difficulty an advancement, and every contest a victory; and this is the pursuit of virtue.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
In the non-internet world where behavior is observable and people are accountable, virtue is easy to spot.
DAVE HUNTOON
"Divided", The Moderate Voice, April 23, 2017
Virtue never has been as respectable as money.
MARK TWAIN
Innocents Abroad
Virtue, like beauty, is commonly only skin deep.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Content with poverty, my soul I arm;
And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.
JOHN DRYDEN
Imitation of Horace
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