Virtue Quotes

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One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge. When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fibre. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer.

Theodore Roosevelt

Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.

Virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen.

Charles Dickens

It is not true that men never change; they change for the worse, as well as for the better. It is not true they are ungrateful; more often the benefactor rates his favors higher than their worth; and often too he does not allow for circumstances. If few men have the moral force to resist impulses, most men do carry within themselves the germs of virtues as well as of vices, of heroism as well as of cowardice. Such is human nature — education and circumstances do the rest.

Napoleon I of France

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

Michel de Montaigne

No one dies too soon who has finished the course of perfect virtue.

Hence both women and children must be educated with an eye to the constitution, if indeed it makes any difference to the virtue of a city-state that its children be virtuous, and its women too. And it must make a difference, since half the free population are women, and from children come those who participate in the constitution.

My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes many one.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest.

She [virtue] requires a rough and stormy passage; she will have either outward difficulties to wrestle with, 11 … or internal difficulties.

Michel de Montaigne

Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.

Virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality.

To preserve health is a moral and religious duty, for health is the basis of all social virtues. We can no longer be useful when not well.

He who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the plants, the waters, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments - is the rich and royal man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Prosperity unmasks the vices; adversity reveals the virtues.

My confidence is that there will for a long time be virtue and good sense enough in our countrymen to correct abuses.

Thomas Jefferson

I believe there exists, & I feel within me, an instinct for the truth, or knowledge or discovery, of something of the same nature as the instinct of virtue, & that our having such an instinct is reason enough for scientific researches without any practical results ever ensuing from them.

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

Personal virtue is no substitute for political hard-headedness.

Margaret Thatcher

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.

Abraham Lincoln

In self-trust all the virtues are comprehended.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.

A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us.

Henry David Thoreau