“To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.”

Diary (21 December 1843), referring to Aristotle's Ethics
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)

From the Letters of Lord Byron (2 January 1817), p. 6.
Lord Byron's Armenian Exercises and Poetry (1870)

Cellui ou celle en qui plus a vertus est le plus hault, ne la haulteur ou abbaisement des gens ne gist mie es corps selon le sexe mais en la perfeccion des meurs et des vertus.
Part I, ch. 9, p. 24.
Le Livre de la Cité des Dames (c. 1405)
Source: The Book of the City of Ladies

Verse IV.2
Tirukkural

Variant translations:
Virtue and vice are not the same, even if they undergo the same torment.
The violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation.
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor.

than hermits
Vatican biography of Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Vatican News Service http://www.vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_20040516_al-hardini_en.html (May 2004)

La modération des grands hommes ne borne que leurs vices. La modération des faibles est médiocrité.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 168.