“Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.”
— Gilbert K. Chesterton
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
—Aristotle
Passion for wealth engenders worry, envy, deceit, hatred, curses, and countless other barriers to virtue.
—Leo Tolstoy
“So that by virtue of our rising in Christ we have received life and have become the subjects of a wondrous change,— old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.”
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
—John Milton
The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.
—Laozi
I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.
—John Milton
I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
—George Washington
It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.
—Voltaire
Propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue.
—Georg Hegel
And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.
—Søren Kierkegaard
To be even minded is the greatest virtue.
—Heraclitus
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed.
—Ernest Hemingway
He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.
—Aristotle
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
—Aristotle
The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and good habit of the soul.
—Plato
Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.
—Plato
The soul is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it, by virtue of having no willing association with the body in life but avoiding it…..Practicing philosophy in the right way is a training to die easily.
—Socrates
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues
The religious system of the bulk of nominal Christians is satisfied with some appearance of virtue
—William Wilberforce
Christianity is not satisfied with producing merely the specious guise of virtue.
—William Wilberforce
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
—Cicero
God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially, for virtue cannot subsist without substance.
—Isaac Newton
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
—Voltaire
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
—George Washington
Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence–and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without.
—Nikolai Gogol
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.
—John Locke
Nobody has a monopoly on truth or virtue.
—Peter R. Rose