Virtue Quotes - Page 20

• Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.

  David Brooks

  Important, Hardest

  6 Copy quote

• Obedience is the only virtue that plants the other virtues in the heart and preserves them after they have been planted.

  Pope Gregory I

  Heart, Obedience, Plant

  33 Copy quote

• Tolerance is the virtue of people who do not believe in anything.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Believe, People, Tolerance

  193 Copy quote

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

  Baron de Montesquieu

  Country, Republic

  Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (2015). “The Spirit of Laws”, p.13, Library of Alexandria

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• Virtue shuns ease as a companion. It demands a rough and thorny path.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Ease, Demand, Path

  'Essais' (1580) bk. 2, ch. 11

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Vices, Morality, Cloaks

  4 Copy quote

• No people ever yet groaned under the heavy yoke of slavery, but when they deserv'd it. ...The truth is, all might be free if they valued freedom, and defended it as they ought. ...If therefore a people will not be free; if they have not virtue enough to maintain their liberty against a presumptuous invader, they deserve no pity, and are to be treated with contempt and ignominy.

  Samuel Adams

  People, Liberty, Yoke

  7 Copy quote

• The great virtue of bureaucracy - indeed, perhaps its defining characteristic ~ was that it was an institutional method for applying general rules to specific cases, thereby making the actions of government fair and predictable.

  Max Weber

  Government, Defining, Action

  57 Copy quote

• As far as I know, there is no proof whatever of the existence of an objective reality apart from our senses, and I do not see why we should accept the outside world as such solely by virtue of our senses.

  M. C. Escher

  Reality, World, Accepting

  "On Being a Graphic Artist" by M. C. Escher,

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

  Ameen Rihani

  Pride, Cease

  Ameen Rihani (2016). “The Book of Khalid: A Critical Edition”, p.158, Syracuse University Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Don't undo a brave and noble deed. Don't rob yourself of your own virtue.

  James Lee Burke

  Brave, Noble, Deeds

  James Lee Burke (2011). “The Glass Rainbow: A Dave Robicheaux Novel”, p.429, Simon and Schuster

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand what more and what else the good life for man is.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Good Life, Men, Seeking

  Alasdair MacIntyre (2013). “After Virtue”, p.254, A&C Black

  51 Copy quote

  Show source

• What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without ground for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.

  Alasdair MacIntyre

  Dark, What Matters, Community

  Alasdair MacIntyre (1981). “After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory”, Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd

  54 Copy quote

  Show source

• Curb your talent lest it speed where virtue does not guide.

  Dante Alighieri

  Doe, Talent, Speed

  4 Copy quote

• All virtue which is impracticable is spurious.

  Edmund Burke

  Edmund Burke (1852). “The Works and Correspondence of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke”, p.173

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Conscience is the virtue of the observers not the agents of action

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Agents, Action, Observers

  4 Copy quote

• The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.

  Robert Graves

  Art, Lying, Believe

  Robert Graves (1960). “Food for Centaurs: Stories, Talks, Critical Studies, Poems”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Really unreflective people are now inwardly without Christianity, and the more moderate and reflective people of the intellectual middle class now possess only an adapted, that is to say marvelously simplified Christianity. A god who in his love arranges everything in a manner that in the end will be best for us; a god who gives to us and takes from us our virtue and our happiness, so that as a whole all is meet and fit and there is no reason for us to take life sadly, let alone exclaim against it; in short, resignation and modest demands elevated to godhead

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Class, People, Giving

  13 Copy quote

• The virtue you would like to have, assume it is already yours, appropriate it, enter into the part and live the character just as the great actor is absorbed in... the part he plays.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Character, Play, Actors

  27 Copy quote

• Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

  Albert Camus

  Passion, Truth Is, Charitable

  Albert Camus (2008). “Notebooks, 1951-1959”, Ivan R Dee

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ideas, Mike Jones, an engineer at Google explained, were like babies - everything about their environment said they shouldn't exist. But they do. You can't dwell on problems too early, or they will swamp the virtues and you will decide not to do the project.

  Steven Levy

  Baby, Ideas, Google

  4 Copy quote

• A surprising feature of herbal research is that it is seldom the rare, exotic, and beautiful plant that proves the most interesting; more often it is some common, familiar, and despised weed that is discovered to have undreamed-of virtues.

  Euell Gibbons

  Beautiful, Weed, Interesting

  52 Copy quote

• Whatever happens, the path of virtue should not be given up.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Path, Given, Should

  7 Copy quote

• Some consider themselves great because they have vast territory, some because they have finance, some because they have arms, some because they have vast populations, but, the real wealth, real greatnesss is virtue which earns the Grace of God.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Real, Grace, Arms

  4 Copy quote

• Virtue is the fragrance of the flowers which the tree of life puts forth. Educated people must be identified in society by their strict adherence to virtue, not by more skilled methods of escaping the consequences of vice.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Flower, Escaping, People

  4 Copy quote