The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
Aristotle
78 quotes about virtues follow in order of popularity. Be sure to bookmark and share your favorites!
They punish you for all your virtues. They forgive you entirely--your mistakes.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Rene Descartes
Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices.
Benjamin Franklin
Whoever feels pain in hearing a good character of his neighbor, will feel a pleasure in the reverse. And those who despair to rise in distinction by their virtues, are happy if others can be depressed to a level of themselves.
Benjamin Franklin
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
G. K. Chesterton
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C. S. Lewis
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
Bertrand Russell
Patience is the greatest of all virtues.
Cato the Elder
Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
Thomas Hobbes
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.
Joseph Hall
You will find the Americans much like the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.
Harold Macmillan
Constancy is the complement of all other human virtues.
Giuseppe Mazzini
POVERTY, n. A file provided for the teeth of the rats of reform. The number of plans for its abolition equals that of the reformers who suffer from it, plus that of the philosophers who know nothing about it. Its victims are distinguished by possession of all the virtues and by their faith in leaders seeking to conduct them into a prosperity where they believe these to be unknown.
Ambrose Bierce
The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Be not ashamed of thy virtues; honor's a good brooch to wear in a man's hat at all times.
Ben Jonson
VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.
Ambrose Bierce
I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues. It comforts and enlivens without the risks attendant on spirituous liquors. Gentle herb! Let the florid grape yield to thee. Thy soft influence is a more safe inspirer of social joy.
James Boswell
I don't imagine I would have chosen to spend the last twenty-six years of my life writing about a character whose values and virtues I disdained.
Robert Parker
Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.
Clare Booth Luce
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Casey Stengel
DELUSION, n. The father of a most respectable family, comprising Enthusiasm, Affection, Self-denial, Faith, Hope, Charity and many other goodly sons and daughters. All hail, Delusion! Were it not for thee The world turned topsy-turvy we should see; For Vice, respectable with cleanly fancies, Would fly abandoned Virtue's gross advances. Mumfrey Mappel.
Ambrose Bierce
Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.
William Shenstone
Be to her virtues very kind. Be to her faults a little blind.
Matthew Prior
Music like religion, unconditionally brings in its train all the moral virtues to the heart it enters, even though that heart is not in the least worthy.
Jean Baptiste Montegut
Humility is the solid foundation of all virtues.
Kong Fu Zi
If thou desire to purchase honor with thy wealth, consider first how that wealth became thine; if thy labor got it, let thy wisdom keep it; if oppression found it, let repentance restore it; if thy parent left it, let thy virtues deserve it; so shall thy honor be safer, better and cheaper.
Francis Quarles
Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.
Nikola Tesla
Jamie disliked all forms of pomp and pomposity so his spirit would return to haunt me should I make exaggerated claims about his virtues, ... But I can say this: Jamie represented something of great importance in today's media world ... a simple desire to inform the public as accurately and impartially and comprehensibly as possible within the constraints of daily, news agency reporting.
Stephen Ward
If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; first, you get accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never had.
I. F. Stone
Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.
Jean Genet
Not to be cheered by praise, Not to be grieved by blame, But to know thoroughly ones own virtues or powers Are the characteristics of an excellent man.
Saskya Pandita
Teach you children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary.
Sir Walter Scott
He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William G. Golding
I'd been a cult singer-songwriter generally well-regarded by some of the better vocalists and journalists of the seventies. Suddenly, a mass audience perceived me as a troubadour who'd dedicated his life to extolling the virtues of pineapple-based beverages.
Rupert Holmes
Punctuality is one of the cardinal business virtues: always insist on it in your subordinates.
Don Marquis
Not to be cheered by praise, not to be grieved by blame, but to know thoroughly one's own virtues or powers are the characteristics of an excellent man.
Satchel Paige
It's in the preparation -- in those dreary pedestrian virtues they taught you in seventh grade and you didn't believe. It's making the extra call and caring a lot.
Diane Sawyer
There is a magic in that little world, home; it is a mystic circle that surrounds comforts and virtues never known beyond its hallowed limits.
Robert Southey
PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction -- prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.
Ambrose Bierce
I'd have wanted my chance to come a bit quicker but maybe I wasn't ready for it then. The new manager told me to be patient at the start of the season and that's probably not one of my virtues. You don't want to be a sub. It took a few weeks and a few suspensions but I've got a chance now.
Shaun Maloney
If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; you get accused of things you never did and praised for virtues you never had.
I. F. Stone
Sometimes we may learn more from a man's errors, than from his virtues.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.
Jerome K. Jerome
HYPOCRITE, n. One who, profession virtues that he does not respect secures the advantage of seeming to be what he depises.
Ambrose Bierce
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
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
Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.
Quintilian
CEMETERY, n. An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target and stone-cutters spell for a wager. The inscriptions following will serve to illustrate the success attained in these Olympian games: His virtues were so conspicuous that his enemies, unable to overlook them, denied them, and his friends, to whose loose lives they were a rebuke, represented them.
Ambrose Bierce
Its themes are about family, about not giving up on your dreams, courage. They are very secular virtues, but they also could potentially be Christian virtues.
Dennis Rice
The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor
We need to cultivate civic virtues, enhance the observance of public order, upgrade the level of service and strive to bring about a new social environment.
Zhang Huiguang
I courted fame but as a spur to brave and honest deeds; who despises fame will soon renounce the virtues that deserve it.
David Mallet
Unless I accept my faults, I will most certainly doubt my virtues.
Hugh Prather
He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Sir Winston Churchill
Unless I accept my virtues, I most certainly will be overwhelmed by my faults.
Robert Coleman
Rather do what is nothing in the purpose than to be idle, that the devil may find thee doing. The bird that sits is easily shot when the fliers escape the fowler. Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all the virtues, and is the self-made sepulcher of a living man.
Francis Quarles
MEDAL, n. A small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or services more or less authentic. It is related of Bismark, who had been awarded a medal for gallantly rescuing a drowning person, that, being asked the meaning of the medal, he replied: 'I save lives sometimes.' And sometimes he didn't.
Ambrose Bierce
The desire to be singular and to astonish by ways out of the common seems to me to be the source of many virtues.
Marie de Sevigne
You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.
Frank Miller
Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams
DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evolved instead - a circumstance from which that wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that the ladies are the greater sufferers from dyspepsia.
Ambrose Bierce
It doesn't matter that Cathy was what I have called a monster. Perhaps we can't understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins. And who in his mind has not probed the black water?
John Steinbeck
EPITAPH, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect. Following is a touching example: Here lie the bones of Parson Platt, Wise, pious, humble and all that, Who showed us life as all should live it; Let that be said -- and God forgive it!
Ambrose Bierce
Let someone else acknowledge your virtues.
Maori Proverb
People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.
Elizabeth Gaskell
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