Edmund Burke - Virtue Quotes

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Whilst shame keeps its watch, virtue is not wholly extinguished in the heart; nor will moderation be utterly exiled from the minds of tyrants.

Edmund Burke
I do not hesitate to say that the road to eminence and power, from an obscure condition, ought not to be made too easy, nor a thing too much of course. If rare merit be the rarest of all things, it ought to pass through some sort of probation. The temple of honor ought to be seated on an eminence. If it be open through virtue, let it be remembered, too, that virtue is never tried but by some difficulty and some struggle.

Edmund Burke
Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate: these waters must! if troubled before they can exert their virtues.

Edmund Burke
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.

Edmund Burke
Virtue will catch as well as vice by contact; and the public stock of honest manly principle will daily accumulate. We are not too nicely to scrutinize motives as long as action is irreproachable. It is enough (and for a worthy man perhaps too much) to deal out its infamy to convicted guilt and declared apostasy.

Edmund Burke
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.

Edmund Burke
Falsehood and delusion are allowed in no case whatever: But, as in the exercise of all the virtues, there is an economy of truth. It is a sort of temperance, by which a man speaks truth with measure that he may speak it the longer.

Edmund Burke
It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

Edmund Burke
The great must submit to the dominion of prudence and of virtue, or none will long submit to the dominion of the great.

Edmund Burke
Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit.

Edmund Burke
True humility-the basis of the Christian system-is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.

Edmund Burke
All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise and barter.

Edmund Burke
I have in general no very exalted opinion of the virtue of paper government.

Edmund Burke
The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends most to the perpetuation of society itself. It makes our weakness subservient to our virtue; it grafts benevolence even upon avarice. The possession of family wealth and of the distinction which attends hereditary possessions (as most concerned in it,) are the natural securities for this transmission.

Edmund Burke
There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

Edmund Burke
Prudence is not only the first in rank of the virtues political and moral, but she is the director and regulator, the standard of them all.

Edmund Burke
Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.

Edmund Burke