“No virtue is equal to the good of others and
no vice greater than hurting others.”
Tulsidas (1532–1623) Hindu poet-saint
Tulsidas in "A Garden of Deeds: Ramacharitmanas, a Message of Human Ethics", p. 37
“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.”
Source: Aphorisms and Reflections (1901), p. 196
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Catholic bishop 1840–1916Related quotes
“Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.”
Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–1893) American politician, 19th President of the United States (in office from 1877 to 1881)
Diary (21 December 1843), referring to Aristotle's Ethics
Diary and Letters of Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1922 - 1926)
George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement
From the Letters of Lord Byron (2 January 1817), p. 6.
Lord Byron's Armenian Exercises and Poetry (1870)
Christine de Pizan book The Book of the City of Ladies
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
“There is no greater wealth than Virtue,
And no greater loss than to forget it.”
Thiruvalluvar book Tirukkuṛaḷ
Verse IV.2
Tirukkural
Aurelius Augustinus book The City of God
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.
“Those who struggle for virtue in community life will have greater merit”
Saint Nimatullah Kassab (1808–1858) Lebanese Maronite monk and saint
than hermits <br class="br"> 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)
“To have once been a criminal is no disgrace. To remain a criminal is the disgrace”
Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist
La modération des grands hommes ne borne que leurs vices. La modération des faibles est médiocrité.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 168.