quotations about virtue
All earthly blessings virtue sends:
On virtue all the world depends.
VALMIKI
The Ramayan
Content not thyself that thou art virtuous in the general: for one link being wanting, the chain is defective.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Let virtue be the mantle of thy conduct.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Virtue and liberty are both good things, and when the world is well-ordered, they are in harmony with one another. Today we often find them at odds. The friends of virtue see liberty abused in the pursuit of vices which prove self-destructive to the individual and harmful to others, while friends of liberty think the friends of virtue want to force them to live a certain way, confining their personal freedom, and for that matter, differing vastly among themselves about what virtue is.
JAMES STONER
"The Harmony and Balance of Virtue and Liberty", Learn Liberty, April 24, 2017
Our virtues are like crystals hidden in rocks. No man shall find them by any soft ways, but by the hammer and by fire.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
There is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness.
GEORGE WASHINGTON
First Inaugural Address, April 30, 1789
Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.
CONFUCIUS
attributed, The Wisdom of Confucius
What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt
Wickedness, in various shapes, lifts her proud head, and reigns triumphant; while modest virtue seeks the shades, or pines in want, or groans in chains, or mourns in the dungeon.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
Select Essays
Virtue, my pet, is an abstract idea, varying in its manifestations with the surroundings. Virtue in Provence, in Constantinople, in London, and in Paris bears very different fruit, but is none the less virtue.
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Letters of Two Brides
Moreover, virtue is not concerned with the amount of pleasure experienced by the external sense, as this depends on the disposition of the body; what matters is how much the interior appetite is affected by that pleasure.
THOMAS AQUINAS
Summa Theologica
Virtue its own reward? Alas!
And what a poor one as a rule!
Be virtuous and life will pass
Like one long term of Sunday School.
HARRY GRAHAM
Perverted Proverbs
We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Heretics
The virtues are a chain; and, if you break one link, the whole chain is useless.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Because virtue is an ideal, to go further down the road of virtue is always possible.
JOHN W. CHAPMAN
Virtue: Nomos XXXIV
The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Many virtues are but disguised vices.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Characteristics
Of vice or virtue, whether blest or cursed,
Which meets contempt, or which compassion first?
Count all th' advantage prosp'rous vice attains,
'Tis but what virtue flies from and disdains.
ALEXANDER POPE
An Essay on Man