
“Making a virtue of necessity.”
III, 86
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato
Book I, Chapter VIII, 14
Compare: "To maken vertue of necessite", Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, "The Knightes Tale", line 3044
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)
Laudem virtutis necessitati damus.
“Making a virtue of necessity.”
III, 86
Rifacimento of Orlando Innamorato
“Others made a virtue of necessity.”
Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564), Chapter 22.
“3313. Make a Virtue of Necessity.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
“People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it.”
Rameau's Nephew (1762)
Context: People praise virtue, but they hate it, they run away from it. It freezes you to death, and in this world you've got to keep your feet warm.
Speech to the American Legion convention, New York City (27 August 1952); as quoted in "Democratic Candidate Adlai Stevenson Defines the Nature of Patriotism" in Lend Me Your Ears : Great Speeches In History (2004) by William Safire, p. 81 - 82
Context: It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.
Men who have offered their lives for their country know that patriotism is not the fear of something; it is the love of something.
“The good citizen need not of necessity possess the virtue which makes a good man.”
Book III, 1276b.34
Politics
“If great renown is won by true merit, and if virtue is considered in itself and apart from success, then all that we praise in any of our ancestors was Fortune's gift.”
Si veris magna paratur
fama bonis et si successu nuda remoto
inspicitur virtus, quidquid laudamus in ullo
maiorum, fortuna fuit.
Book IX, line 593 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia
“Stop giving meaningless praise and start giving meaningful action.”
Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 44