quotations about virtue
Virtue is the conformity of our affections and actions with the public good, or the voluntary production of the greatest happiness in ourselves and others.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
I respect a person that has had to fight and howl for his decency.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
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
While bars and bolts may baffle the thief, virtue alone will defeat the slanderer.
WILLIAM SCOTT DOWNEY
Proverbs
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
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
Virtues are to the person what nutrition is to the body.
DONALD DEMARCO
"A Modest Proposal for an Immodest Culture", National Catholic Register, April 22, 2017
There is no road or ready way to virtue.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
Virtue, like beauty, is commonly only skin deep.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
The more we use wisdom and virtue, the more they are our own, and the more we have of them.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Content with poverty, my soul I arm;
And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.
JOHN DRYDEN
Imitation of Horace
Virtue makes us appear amiable to others; vice, contemptible even to ourselves.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
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
Overt and apparent virtues, bring forth praise; but there be secret and hidden virtues, that bring forth fortune; certain deliveries of a man's self, which have no name.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Fortune", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
There is nothing we abhor so much as to have to be virtuous in private.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Virtue alone has majesty in death.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
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
Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
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