The virtue of achievement is victory over oneself. Those who know this can never know defeat.
Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.
Over Legislation is not necessarily a virtue. It often leads to misuse of law.
There is virtue in work and there is virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.
Whilst weakness and timidity keep us to our duty, virtue has often all the honor.
It is a shame for a man to desire honor because of his noble progenitors, and not to deserve it by his own virtue.
Virtue in its grandest aspect is neither more nor less than following reason.
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.
The Beatitudes, far from being a new set of virtues that further divide the religious haves and have nots, are words of hope and healing to those who have been marginalized.
Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.
There has come into existence, chiefly in America, a breed of men who claim to be feminists. They imagine that they have understood what women want and that they are capable of giving it to them. They help with the dishes at home and make their own coffee in the office, basking the while in the refulgent consciousness of virtue. Such men are apt to think of the true male feminists as utterly chauvinistic.
As the Prussian historian Treitschke later complained, the proponents of free trade in Hamburg had 'in German fashion made out of necessity not just a virtue but a theory'.
No polity can be devised which shall perpetuate freedom among a people that are dead to honor and integrity. Liberty and virtue are twin sisters, and the best fabric in the world. . . .
Courage is the most fundamental of all virtues.
There is a patience that cackles. There are a great many virtues that are hen-like. They are virtue, to be sure; but everybody in the neighborhood has to know about them.
Too much virtue can be criminal.
Here then is the origin and rise of government; namely, a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue to govern the world; here too is the design and end of government, viz. Freedom and security.
The only virtue I want to claim is truth and nonviolence.
Compassion is not a virtue -- it is a commitment. It's not something we have or don't have -- it's something we choose to practice.
Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem.