quotations about virtue
Every deed of dishonor, every victim of vice, every ghastly spectacle of crime, is an eloquent testimony to the need and the worth of virtue.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
There is no road or ready way to virtue.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
JOHN STEINBECK
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
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
No virtuous act can be fully virtuous unless it is freely chosen by the person acting.
JAMES STONER
"The Harmony and Balance of Virtue and Liberty", Learn Liberty, April 24, 2017
There is nothing we abhor so much as to have to be virtuous in private.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
It matters not from what stock we are descended so long as we have virtue; for that alone is true Nobility.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Happiness and Virtue clasp hands and walk together.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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
As the flower, when plucked for enjoyment, begins to wither, so does virtue practiced for reward begin to vanish.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
The virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarcely worth the sentinel.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Vicar of Wakefield
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
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
Wealth is useless on the day of wrath, but virtue saves from death.
BIBLE
Proverbs 11:4
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
Virtue seeks the greatest distance from vice.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
God hath not called us that we should be unclean, but holy and virtuous.
THOMAS BECON
Writings of the Rev. Thomas Becon
Whenever you are to do a thing, though it can never be known but to yourself, ask yourself how you would act were all the world looking at you, and act accordingly.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785