quotations about virtue
No virtuous act can be fully virtuous unless it is freely chosen by the person acting.
JAMES STONER
"The Harmony and Balance of Virtue and Liberty", Learn Liberty, April 24, 2017
Overt and apparent virtues, bring forth praise; but there be secret and hidden virtues, that bring forth fortune; certain deliveries of a man's self, which have no name.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Fortune", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Virtue consists in doing our duty in the several relations we sustain in respect to ourselves, to our fellow men, and to God, as known from reason, conscience, and revelation.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Virtue never has been as respectable as money.
MARK TWAIN
Innocents Abroad
A man that hath no virtue in himself ever envieth virtue in others.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
Happiness and Virtue clasp hands and walk together.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
There is no road or ready way to virtue.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
If one doth act in friendly wise,
With no evil thought toward any single creature,
And in so doing becometh proper,
And if he have compassion in his soul
Toward all living beings--this noble one
Doth acquire abundant Virtue.
GAUTAMA BUDDHA
Iti-Vuttaka
It matters not from what stock we are descended so long as we have virtue; for that alone is true Nobility.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
The virtue which requires to be ever guarded is scarcely worth the sentinel.
OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The Vicar of Wakefield
That theatrical kind of virtue, which requires publicity for its stage, and an applauding world for its audience, could not be depended on, in the secrecy of solitude, or the retirement of a desert.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
To be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations. If thou hast not conquer'd thyself in that which is thy own particular weakness, thou hast no title to virtue, tho' thou art free of other men's.
WILLIAM PENN
Some Fruits of Solitude
Virtue is the effort, the conquest of a difficulty, leaving, as its results, a balance of happiness. There may be, there is much good in the world, which no virtue has been concerned in producing. But there is no virtue where there is no balance of happiness.
JEREMY BENTHAM
Deontology; or, The Science of Morality
Wealth is useless on the day of wrath, but virtue saves from death.
BIBLE
Proverbs 11:4
Virtue and vice are the only things in this world, which, with our souls, are capable of surviving death; the former is the rational and only procuring cause of all intellectual happiness, and the latter of conscious guilt and misery; and therefore, our indispensable duty and ultimate interest is, to love, cultivate and improve the one, as the means of our greatest good, and to hate and abstain from the other, as productive of our greatest evil.
ETHAN ALLEN
Reason: The Only Oracle of Man
There are some persons on whom virtue sits almost as ungraciously as vice.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
As the flower, when plucked for enjoyment, begins to wither, so does virtue practiced for reward begin to vanish.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
He that has energy enough in his constitution to root out a vice, should go a little farther and try to plant a virtue in its place, otherwise he will have his labour to renew; a strong soil that has produced weeds, may be made to produce wheat, with far less difficulty than it would cost to make it produce nothing.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt,
Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled.
JOHN MILTON
Comus