Virtue Quotes

Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.

The very spring and root of honesty and virtue lie in good education.

More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

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.

If the highest things are unknowable, then the highest capacity or virtue of man cannot be theoretical wisdom.

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.

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

The greatest virtue of man is perhaps curiosity.

Successful and fortunate crime is called virtue.

Cheerfulness is a very great help in fostering the virtue of charity. Cheerfulness itself is a virtue.

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.

I believe it is in my nature to dance by virtue of the beat of my heart, the pulse of my blood and the music in my mind.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

This idea of selfishness as a virtue, as opposed to generosity: That, to me, is unnatural.

Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

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.