Virtue Quotes

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them.

Geraldo has been in Lebanon. He has done some excellent reporting out of there, and of course, we now know by virtue of the president's speech on Tuesday night that the terrorist organizations that operate in that area are now on the list.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Uncommon valor was a common virtue.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.

The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.

Happiness and virtue rest upon each other; the best are not only the happiest, but the happiest are usually the best.

Man cannot be uplifted; he must be seduced into virtue.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Perseverance is a virtue that cannot be understated.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

Prosperity is the measure or touchstone of virtue, for it is less difficult to bear misfortune than to remain uncorrupted by pleasure.

Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edges rock of poverty.

He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.

The only virtue a character needs to possess between hardcovers, even if he bears a real person's name, is vitality: if he comes to life in our imaginations, he passes the test.

Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.

An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery.

Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.

Reputation is rarely proportioned to virtue.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.

To be ambitious of true honor, of the true glory and perfection of our natures, is the very principle and incentive of virtue.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time, and the drawback, if you do not give it your full attention, of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.