Virtue Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Albert Camus

Winston Churchill

Cicero

Karl Marx

William Shakespeare

Socrates

Nikola Tesla

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.

Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.

William Shakespeare

Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

William Shakespeare

Someone will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say that the greatest good of a man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living — that you are still less likely to believe.

Capital is money, capital is commodities. … By virtue of it being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs.

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

Charles Kingsley

I would remind you that extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!

Barry Goldwater

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that's why you're not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.

Because Impudence is a Vice, it does not follow that Modesty is a Virtue; it is built upon Shame, a Passion in our Nature, and may be either Good or Bad according to the Actions perform'd from that Motive.

Bernard Mandeville

But a meek humble Man of modest Sense,
Who, Preaching Peace, does practice Continence;
Whose pious life's a proof he does believe,
Mysterious Truths, which no Man can conceive.
If upon Earth there dwell such God-like Men,
I'll here Recant my Paradox to them;
Adore those Shrines of Virtue, homage pay,
And, with the rabble world, their Laws obey.
If such there are, yet grant me This at least,
Man differs more from Man, than Man from Beast.

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... Advanced art today is no longer a cause – it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

Men lose more conquests by their own awkwardness than by any virtue in the woman.

Ninon de Lenclos

Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or to vice.

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.

Alfred Marshall

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that thankfulness is indeed a virtue.

William J. Bennett

Rarely do great beauty and great virtue dwell together.

The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Virtue is doing it.

David Starr Jordan

Whoever will cultivate their own mind will find full employment. Every virtue does not only require great care in the planting, but as much daily solicitude in cherishing as exotic fruits and flowers; the vices and passions (which I am afraid are the natural product of the soil) demand perpetual weeding. Add to this the search after knowledge... and the longest life is too short.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices.

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even for our virtues.

Honoré de Balzac