Freemasonry is an order whose leading star is philanthropy and whose principles inculcate an unceasing devotion to the cause of virtue and morality.
God deliver us all from prejudice and unkindness, and fill us with the love of truth and virtue.
In many cases hate a person is rooted in the involuntary estimate of its virtues.
Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.
A man of virtue, judgment, and prudence speaks not until there is silence.
The absence of utopianism in the Constitution, law, and traditional political culture has been. . . important in limiting expectations concerning what can be achieved by politics. The history of the last two centuries confirms what the framers of the Constitution understood: that the perfect is the enemy of the good, and the search for unalloyed virtue in public life leads to unalloyed terror.
Balancing your budget is like protecting your virtue. You have to learn when to say no.
Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitative-ness.
When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.
It's a vice to trust all, and equally a vice to trust none.
Courage is the most fundamental of all virtues.
If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.
For, truly speaking, whoever provokes me to a good act or thought has given me a pledge of his fidelity to virtue,--he has come under the bonds to adhere to that cause to which we are jointly attached.
Some reformers may urge that in the ages distant future, patriotism, like the habit of monogamous marriage, will become a needless and obsolete virtue; but just at present the man who loves other countries as much as he does his own is quite as noxious a member of society as the man who loves other women as much as he loves his wife. Love of country is an elemental virtue, like love of home.
Pride is both a virtue and a vice.
Original thoughts can be understood only in virtue of the unoriginal elements which they contain.
The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.
The cardinal virtue of all beauty is restraint.
If the supply of virtue is insufficient in a free society like America, it is almost nonexistent in Islamic societies because coerced virtues are not virtues at all.
Virtue is not malicious; wrong done her Is righted even when men grant they err.