Quotes about virtue
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“Faith is the grip that clergy have over you. It's the invisible rope around your neck that pulls you along the road they want you to travel, for their benefit, not yours. It's a dead-end word. It's a word of bondage. It's a word that lets you believe what you've been told to believe, without feeling that you've been told what to believe, but you have, and you can stop pretending any time you like. It's not a virtue, that's the last thing it is. It's an abdication from reality. It's a dumb act of self-hypnosis. It's a cowardly cop-out. It's gullibility with a halo, and hiding behind it is like pretending to be an invalid.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Your faith is a joke" (16 December 2010)
2010

Faith, Travel, Feeling, Reality

“We cannot suppose that our opposition has made a corrupt and dissipated nation more friendly to America, or created in them a greater respect for the rights of mankind. We can therefore expect a restoration and establishment of our privileges, and a compensation for the injuries we have received, from their want of power, from their fears, and not from their virtues. The unanimity and valor, which will effect an honorable peace, can render a future contest for our liberties unnecessary. He who has strength to chain down the wolf is a madman if he let him loose without drawing his teeth and paring his nails.”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech about Declaration of Independence (1776)

Fear, Peace, Wolf, Future

“Had the Pilgrim Fathers been met on Plymouth Rock by immigration officials; had their children been placed immediately in good free schools, and given the care of doctors, dentists, and nurses; had they found themselves in infinitely better circumstances than they had ever enjoyed in England, indulging in undreamed-of luxuries, and taught by kind-hearted philanthropists,—what pioneer virtues would they have developed, what sons would they have bred, what honours would history have accorded them? If our early settlers were masterful, they earned the right to mastery, and the price they paid for it was endurance. To the sacrifices which they made, to their high courage and heroic labours, we owe law, liberty, and well-being.”

Agnes Repplier (1855–1950) American essayist

in "The Modest Immigrant" (1916)

Children, School, Law, History

“It has been said that to appreciate what virtue and morals mean, men must live virtuous and moral lives. It is equally true, that a knowledge of the objects of science is not to be attained by any scheme of definitions, however carefully contrived. He who would know what geometry is, must venture boldly into its depths and learn to think and feel as a geometer.”

James Joseph Sylvester (1814–1897) English mathematician

J. J. Sylvester. "A Probationary Lecture on Geometry", Collected Mathematical Papers, Vol. 2 (1908), p. 9 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=miun.aas8085.0002.001;view=1up;seq=25

Men, Feeling, Knowledge, Thinking

“There is, however, a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769), volume i, p. 273
1760s

“What was right and true yesterday is wrong and false today. What was immoral and shameful — promiscuity, abortion, euthanasia, suicide — has become progressive and praiseworthy. Nietzsche called it the transvaluation of all values; the old virtues become sins, and the old sins become virtues.”

Patrick Buchanan (1938) American politician and commentator

2010s, The Death of the West (2002)

Suicide, Falseness

“Let them recognize virtue and rot for having lost it.”
Virtutem videant intabescantque relicta.

Persius (34–62) ancient latin poet

Satire III, line 38.
Alternate translation (by William Gifford):—
"In all her charms, set Virtue in their eye,
And let them see their loss, despair, and—die!"
The Satires

“Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Letter to James Boswell, December 7, 1782, p. 494
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol IV

Happiness

“Therefore, in the last analysis, the problem facing the Romanian people today, on which all others depend, is the substitution of this fake elite with a real national one based on virtue, love and sacrifice for country, justice and love for the people, honesty, work, order, discipline, honest dealing, and honor.”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Love, People, Justice, Problem

“Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#398
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

“I always used to think that the falling in love of a young man gave a savour to all his virtues, and that, even if he were a perfect sink of iniquity, Love would suffice in an instant to raise him to the stars.”

Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–1579) Italian writer and philosopher

Act I., Scene I. — (Fabritio).
Translation reported in Harbottle's Dictionary of quotations French and Italian (1904), p. 328.
L’Alessandro (1544)

Love, Star, Thinking, Perfection

“The sphere of the attractive virtue which is in the moon extends as far as the earth, and entices up the waters; but as the moon flies rapidly across the zenith, and the waters cannot follow so quickly, a flow of the ocean is occasioned in the torrid zone towards the westward.”

Johannes Kepler book Astronomia nova

As quoted by Bryant, ibid.
Astronomia nova (1609)

Water

“That virtue was sufficient of herself for happiness.”

Diogenes Laërtius (180–240) biographer of ancient Greek philosophers

Plato, 42.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 3: Plato

Happiness

“Excellent Lord: —Knowing your Excellency's love for painting and your passion for protecting it as shown in the patronage of Ginlio Eomano; —being further desirous of pleasing your Excellency, —I have taken the opportunity of Messer Pietro Aretino's arrival [in Venice] to paint his likeness, and as he comes — a second St. Paul —to preach the virtues of your Excellency, and I likewise know that you are fond of so faithful a servant because of his many virtues, I make you herewith a present of his portrait. But I also bear in remembrance the Signor Girolamo Adorno who adored the Marquis of Mantua, and as he was a qualified gentleman, I send your Excellency a present of him also. These may not be gifts worthy of so great a person as your Excellency.... Most devoted servant, Titiano Vecellio.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

Quote from a letter of Titian, to the Marquess Gonzaga of Mantua, from Venice 22 Juin 1527; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 317
Assuredly Titian at this time had Messer Pietro Aretino for a sitter; this letter proves his intimacy with the secretary of Giovanni de Medici
1510-1540

Love, Faith, Passion, Painting

“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, American University speech

People, Evil

“Truth and Virtue do not necessarily belong to wealth and Power and Distinctions of Big Mansions.”

Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833) Indian religious, social, and educational reformer, and humanitarian

Quoted from Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 8 ISBN 9788185990354

Truth, Wealth

“Say, He Whom God shall make manifest will surely redeem the rights of those who truly believe in God and in His signs, for they are the ones who merit reward from His presence. Say, it is far from the glory of Him Whom God shall make manifest that anyone should in this wise make mention of His name, if ye ponder the Cause of God in your hearts. Say, He shall vindicate the Cause through the potency of His command and shall bring to naught all perversion of truth by virtue of His behest. Verily God is potent over all things.”

Báb (1819–1850) Iranian prophet; founder of the religion Bábism; venerated in the Bahá'í Faith

The Kitáb-I-Asmá

God, Truth, Heart

“Next follows the seventh step, the noblest and most elevated that it is possible to realize in the life of time or eternity. It is attained when, above all knowledge and science, we find within us a limitless ignorance; when, passing beyond every name given to God or creatures we expire and pass to an eternal Unnamable where we are lost; when, further than any practice of Virtue, we contemplate and discover within us everlasting Repose, or immeasurable Beatitude where none can act; when we contemplate above all blessed Spirits an essential Beatitude where all are one, melted, lost, in their Superessence in the bosom of a darkness defying all determination or knowledge.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 151-2

Life, God, Knowledge, Science

“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Dedication
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Life

“Although he had his faults as a writer, Howard was a natural storyteller, whose narratives are unmatched for vivid, gripping, headlong action. His heroes – King Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, Solomon Kane are larger than life: men of mighty thews., hot passions, and indomitable will, who easily dominate the stories through which they stride. In fiction, the difference between a writer who is a natural storyteller and one who is not is like the difference between a boat that will float and one that will not. If the writer has this quality, we can forgive many other faults; if not, no other virtue can make up for the lack, any more than gleaming paint and sparkling brass on a boat make up for the fact that it will not float.”

Robert E. Howard (1906–1936) American author

~ L. Sprague de Camp, Conan of the Isles, "Introduction", 1968
About

Life, Men, Forgiveness, Nature

“Our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect.”

Lionel Trilling book The Liberal Imagination

F. Scott Fitzgerald http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/trilling-fsf.html <br class="br">The Liberal Imagination (1950)

“Nobody can tell you that you are content until you feel it in your own heart. When a heart is okay, then it’s a heartfelt feeling and you know it. Not by the virtue of somebody having to tell you this, somebody having to explain you this, but it comes from the feeling of the inside. Knowledge works from the inside out, not from the outside in. Your own experience is the only thing that’ll satisfy that thirst.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Rome, Italy August 22, 1985
1980s

Feeling, Knowledge, Heart

“Being a Christian means that I am called upon to do battle against lies, injustice, cruelty, hypocrisy — you know, all the virtues in the church of liberalism.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2006, Human Events interview (2006)

“Ask the faithful youth
Why the cold urn of her whom long he loved
So often fills his arms; so often draws
His lonely footsteps at the silent hour
To pay the mournful tribute of his tears?
Oh! he will tell thee that the wealth of worlds
Should ne'er seduce his bosom to forego
That sacred hour, when, stealing from the noise
Of care and envy, sweet remembrance soothes
With virtue's kindest looks his aching breast,
And turns his tears to rapture.”

Mark Akenside book The Pleasures of the Imagination

Book II, lines 683–693
The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744)

Love, Youth, World, Faith

“By Christianity I do not mean charity, mercy, kindness, forgiveness. I mean no natural virtue, because all the natural virtues existed and had been practiced by hundreds and thousands of millions before Christ was born. There certainly were some good men even in the days of Christ in Jerusalem, before his death. By Christianity I mean the ideas of redemption, atonement, a good man dying for a bad man, and the bad man getting a receipt in full. By Christianity I mean that system that insists that in the next world a few will be forever happy, while the many will be eternally miserable. Christianity, as I have explained it, must be protected, guarded, and sustained by law. It was founded by the sword that is to say, by physical force,—and must be preserved by like means.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Interview with the Chicago Times, Feb. 14, 1881.

Death, Men, Happiness, World

“More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.”

Robert Smith Surtees (1805–1864) English writer

The Analysis of the Hunting Field (1846) ch. 1

People

“By virtue of the universal concept, thought attains mastery over the particular cases. However, the most formalized universe of logic still refers to the most general structure of the given, experienced world; the pure form is still that of the content which it formalizes. The idea of formal logic itself is a historical event in the development of the mental and physical instruments for universal control and calculability. In this undertaking man had to create theoretical harmony out of actual discord, to purge thought from contradictions, to hypostatize identifiable and fungible units in the complex process of society and nature. Under the rule of formal logic, the notion of the conflict between essence and appearance is expendable if not meaningless; the material content is neutralized; the principle of identity is separated from the principle of contradiction (contradictions are the fault of incorrect thinking); final causes are removed from the logical order. Well defined in their scope and function, concepts become instruments of prediction and control. Formal logic is thus the first step on the long road to scientific thought”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 137

World, Idea, Nature, Thinking

“We, therefore, having directed our inquiry toward a cause that is manifest, sensible, and comprehended by all men, do know that the earth rotates on its own poles, proved by many magnetical demonstrations to exist. For not in virtue only of its stability and its fixed permanent position does the earth posses poles and verticity; it might have had another direction, as eastward or westward, or toward any other quarter. By the wonderful wisdom of the Creator, therefore, forces were implanted in the earth, forces primarily animate, to the end the globe might, with steadfastness, take direction, and that the poles might be opposite, so that on them, as at the extremities of an axis, the movement of diurnal rotation might be performed.”

William Gilbert (astronomer) book De Magnete

As quoted in Gilbert, William. 2013 ed. De Magnete https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=QsLDAgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false. Courier Corporation, pp. 328-329. <br class="br">De Magnete (1600)

Wisdom, Men, Animals

“We have so much to live for, so much to hope for! Humanity is essentially good. We are all of one great family. We can give strength to the voice of hope. We can give thanks to those who work for peace. We can give added attention to those who feed the hungry and bind up the wounds of conflict. To the extent we cultivate this virtue of optimism, we will bless all the world's peoples.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

People, World, Family, Peace

“Patriotism or any other version of the herd instinct seems to me an entirely inadequate basis of virtue. Christianity is from that point of view an explanation of and a support for an essential ingredient in man's nature—far the best, though necessarily imperfect.”

Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood (1864–1958) lawyer, politician and diplomat in the United Kingdom

Letter to Gilbert Murray (25 October 1948), quoted in Gilbert Murray : An Unfinished Autobiography (1960) edited by Jean Smith and Arnold Toynbee, p. 179

Support, Nature

“What disquieted Confucius was "leaving virtue untended and learning unperfected, hearing about what is right but not managing either to turn toward it or to reform what is evil." (7:3) The disciple of Confucius was surely all too aware that his task was one calling not for amazement and miracle but for constant "cutting, filing, carving, polishing" (1:15) in order to become a fully and truly human being, a worthy participant in society.”

Herbert Fingarette (1921–2018) Philosopher

Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (1998)

Learning, Evil

“Our moral virtues benefit mainly other people; intellectual virtues, on the other hand, benefit primarily ourselves; therefore the former make us universally popular, the latter unpopular.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life

People, Universe

“As no one can adventure nearer the throne of God by virtue of his rank, his wealth, or his talent, so no one is kept farther from that throne by his low condition, or by his poverty of wealth, of learning, or of intellect. The prince and the sage are not more welcome to heaven than the poor and ignorant.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 455.

God, Learning, Wealth

“If a man would be righteous, let him depart from a court. Virtue is incompatible with absolute power. He who is ashamed to commit cruelty must always fear it.”
Exeat aula qui volt esse pius. Virtus et summa potestas non coeunt; semper metuet quem saeva pudebunt.

Marcus Annaeus Lucanus book Pharsalia

Book VIII, line 493 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

Fear

“Others, who have the common amount of charity and have not yet grown in grace to this extent, but are guided by their own reason, struggle and strive all day against their sins in order to acquire virtues. Like wrestlers, they are sometimes on top, and sometimes underneath. Such people are doing well. They acquire virtues through their own reason and will, but not because they love and delight in virtue, for they have to exert all of their energy to overcome their natural instincts in order to possess them. Consequently they never enjoy true peace or final victory. They will receive a great reward, but they are not yet sufficiently humble. They have not yet put themselves wholly into God's hands, because they do not yet see Him.”

Walter Hilton (1340–1396) English Augustinian mystic.

Book II, ch. 36 (p. 211)
The Ladder of Perfection (1494)

Love, God, People, Peace

“If they leave college thinking, as they usually do, that science offers a full, accurate, and literal description of man and Nature; if they think scientific research by itself yields final answers to social problems; if they think scientists are the only honest, patient, and careful workers in the world; if they think that Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, and Faraday were unimaginative plodders like their own instructors; if they think theories spring from facts and that scientific authority at any time is infallible; if they think that the ability to write down symbols and read manometers is fair grounds for superiority and pride, and if they think that science steadily and automatically makes for a better world — then they have wasted their time in the science lecture room; they live in an Ivory Laboratory more isolated than the poet's tower, and they are a plain menace to the society they belong to. They are a menace whether they believe all this by virtue of being engaged in scientific work themselves or of being disqualified from it by felt or fancied incapacity.”

Jacques Barzun (1907–2012) Historian

On students, in Teacher in America (1945)

World, Spring, Nature, Problem

“People should be educated about the links between education, ideology, and politics as a way to promote the virtue of humility.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: The Role of Education in Global Security (2007), p.106

People, Education, Way

“Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don't have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen — or indeed a citizen of any nation, the more so to the degree that such rights remain unprotected. If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 25 : Real Patriots Ask Questions

Children, World, Education, Exercises

“The queen of virtues is the recognition of one’s own flaws.”

Jack McDevitt (1935) American novelist, Short story writer

Source: Academy Series - Priscilla "Hutch" Hutchins, Omega (2003), Chapter 33 (p. 349)

“If there be no nobility of descent, all the more indispensable is it that there should be nobility of ascent, — a character in them that bear rule so fine and high and pure that as men come within the circle of its influence they involuntarily pay homage to that which is the one pre-eminent distinction, the royalty of virtue.”

Henry Codman Potter (1835–1908) Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York

Address at the Washington Centennial Service in St. Paul's Chapel, New York, April 30, 1889.

Men

“It is visible then that it was not any Heathen Religion or other Idolatrous Superstition, that first put Man upon crossing his Appetites and subduing his dearest Inclinations, but the skilful Management of wary Politicians; and the nearer we search into human Nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the Moral Virtues are the Political Offspring which Flattery begot upon Pride.”

Bernard Mandeville book The Fable of the Bees

"An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue", p. 37
The Fable of the Bees (1714)

Religion, Search, Nature

“A man who leads a life of tranquillity and reflection, who is not disturbed at home and meddles not with the affairs of the world, may keep his mind at ease and his thoughts in one even course. But such a man has not been tried. All his Ethical philosophy and his passive virtue might turn out to be idle words, if he were once exposed to the rude realities of human existence.”

George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar

The Philosophy of Antoninus

Life, World, Home, Reality

“In every Revolution a dictator is needed to save the state by force, or censors to save it by virtue.”

Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (1767–1794) military and political leader

Fragment 13 (1794). [Source: Saint-Just, Fragments sur les institutions républicaines]

“The interior life must be filled with grace and charity, without dissimulation, of direct intention, rich in virtue, the memory exempt from cares and solicitude, freed and detatched, entirely delivered of every image; the heart set free, open and up lifted above the Heavens; the intelligence empty and stripped of all consideration but God.”

John Ruysbroeck (1293–1381) Flemish mystic

Source: The Seven Steps of the Ladder of Spiritual Love, p. 148

Life, God, Intelligence, Memory

“I'm accusing you of violating the laws of nature," he said, irritated at my failure to respond.
"Nature's virtue is intact," I reassured him. "I just know some different laws.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Dialog between Lord Barton and Lanik Mueller, after the latter performs a series of apparent miracles
[A Planet Called Treason, 1979, 1st Dell printing, 1980, July, Dell Publishing, New York, ISBN 0-440-16897-X, p. 240 of 299]

Law, Failure, Nature

“The short man was all of a piece, but there was nothing reassuring in this; it was a piece of the same material that too many high school principals, boys’ camp directors, and military and naval officers are made of: a texture or quality often dignified by the description, “ability to command”—the desire to bully, override, bear down—the capacity to do so by virtue of office—the habit of having done so for a long time and the confidence of continuing to do so for a long time.”

Avram Davidson book Masters of the Maze

Source: Masters of the Maze (1965), Chapter 7 (p. 85)

School, Confidence, Boy, Time

“If ever, in the British Islands, the useful citizen should lose these virtues, we may be sure, that for England as well as for any other country, notwithstanding the protection of the most formidable navy, notwithstanding the foresight and activity of diplomacy the most extended, and of political science the most profound, the vessels of a degenerate commerce, repulsed from every shore would speedily disappear from those seas whose surface they now cover with the treasures of the universe, bartered for the treasures of the industry of the three kingdoms.”

Charles Dupin (1784–1873) French mathematician

Source: The Commercial Power of Great Britain, 1925, p. xxxi; cited in: The Westminster Review https://books.google.nl/books?id=ByA6AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA339, Volume 4. Oct 1825. p. 340

Universe, Science, Sea, Country

“Inner experience, unable to have principles either in dogma (a moral attitude), or in science (knowledge can be neither its goal nor its origin), or in a search of enriching states (an experimental, aesthetic attitude), it cannot have any other concern nor other goal than itself. Opening myself to inner experience, I have placed in it all value and authority. Henceforth I can have no other value, no other authority (in the realm of mind). Value and authority imply the discipline of a method, the existence of a community.
I call experience a voyage to the end of the possible of man. Anyone may choose not to embark on this voyage, but if he does embark on it, this supposes the negation of the authorities, the existing values which limit the possible. By virtue of the fact that it is negation of other values, other authorities, experience, having a positive existence, becomes itself positively value and authority.
Inner experience has always had objectives other than itself in which one invested value and authority. … If God, knowledge, and suppression of pain were to cease to be in my eyes convincing objectives, … would inner experience from that moment seem empty to me, henceforth impossible without justification? …
I received the answer [from Blanchot]: experience itself is authority.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: L’Expérience Intérieure (1943), p. 7

God, Pain, Search, Communication

“According to the teaching of the Church, men and women with homosexual tendencies 'must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided'. They are called, like other Christians, to live the virtue of chastity. The homosexual inclination is however 'objectively disordered' and homosexual practices are 'sins gravely contrary to chastity'.In those situations where homosexual unions have been legally recognized or have been given the legal status and rights belonging to marriage, clear and emphatic opposition is a duty. One must refrain from any kind of formal cooperation in the enactment or application of such gravely unjust laws and, as far as possible, from material cooperation on the level of their application. In this area, everyone can exercise the right to conscientious objection.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

Doctrinal document Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons, July 31, 2003
2003

Women, Men, Marriage, Law

“Manly energy … is the proper rendering [for αρετην], and not virtue, at least in the present and ordinary acceptation of the word.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Aids to Reflection (1829), comment to Aphorism 7

“In citizens like these, we see the best of our country – resilient and hopeful, caring and strong. These virtues give me an unshakable faith in America. We have faced danger and trial, and there is more ahead. But with the courage of our people and confidence in our ideals, this great Nation will never tire … never falter … and never fail.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2009, Farewell speech to the nation (January 2009)

People, Faith, Hope, Confidence

“"I should not care to be married for my money," said Lucie. "Oh, strange creature!" said the doctor, "you would like to be loved for your face alone, that is to say, for the position in space of the albuminoids and fatty molecules placed there by the working of some Mendelian heredity, but you would dislike to be loved for your fortune, to which you have contributed by your labor and your domestic virtues.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Love, Money

“Nay, rather,
Plant divine, of rarest virtue;
Blisters on the tongue would hurt you.”

Charles Lamb (1775–1834) English essayist

A Farewell to Tobacco (1805)

Hurt

“Hypocrisy is an homage that vice pays to virtue.”

François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.
Maxim 218.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

“I know that as night and shadows are good for flowers, and moonlight and dews are better than a continual sun, so is Christ's absence of special use, and that it hath some nourishing virtue in it, and giveth sap to humility, and putteth an edge on hunger, and furnisheth a fair field for faith to put forth itself.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 277.

Hunger, Faith, Flowers, Sun

“Well may your hearts believe the truths I tell:
'T is virtue makes the bliss, where'er we dwell.”

William Collins (1721–1759) English poet, born 1721

Oriental Eclogues. 1, Line 5. Compare: "That virtue only makes our bliss below, / And all our knowledge is ourselves to know", Alexander Pope, Essay on Man, Epistle iv, line 397.

Truth, Heart

“Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all. […]
Kuhn did reject a simple “correspondence theory” which says true statements correspond to facts about the world. […]
In the wave of skepticism that swept American scholarship at the end of the twentieth century, many influential intellectuals took Kuhn as an ally in their denials of truth as a virtue. I mean the thinkers of the sort that cannot write down or utter the word true except by literally or figuratively putting quotation marks around it—to indicate how they shudder at the very thought of so harmful a notion. Many reflective scientists, who admire much of what Kuhn says about the sciences, believe he encouraged deniers.
It is true that Structure gave enormous impetus to sociological studies of science. Some of that work, with its emphasis on the idea that facts are “socially constructed” and apparent participation in the denial of “truth,” is exactly what conservative scientists protest against. Kuhn made plain that he himself detested that development of his work…”

Ian Hacking (1936) Canadian philosopher

Ian Hacking (2012), Introductory Essay, in 50th anniversary edition of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolution

Truth, World, Idea, Nature

“He said that while one would like to say that God will punish those who do such things and that people often speak in just this way it was his experience that God could not be spoken for and that men with wicked histories often enjoyed lives of comfort and that they died in peace and were buried with honor. He said that it was a mistake to expect too much of justice in this world. He said that the notion that evil is seldom rewarded was greatly overspoken for if there were no advantage to it then men would shun it and how could virtue then be attached to its repudiation?”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Men, God, People, World

“A bard here dwelt, more fat than bard becomes
Who void of envy, guile and lust of gain,
On virtue still and nature's pleasing themes
Poured forth his unpremeditated strain.”

James Thomson (poet) The Castle of Indolence

Canto I, Stanza 68. (Last line said to be "writ by a friend of the author.").
The Castle of Indolence (1748)

Nature, Envy

“This book has neither the virtue of irony nor deserves the sympathy reserved for the truly mad.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

From the third book, "The Book of the Idiot"
The Pillow Book

Books, Madness

“There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

No. 99.
The Guardian (1713)

Justice

“I hear America sometimes playfully accused of sending you all your storms, and am in the habit of parrying the charge by alleging that we are enabled to do this because, in virtue of our protective system, we can afford to make better bad weather than anybody else. And what wiser use could we make of it than to export it in return for the paupers which some European countries are good enough to send over to us who have not attained to the same skill in the manufacture of them?”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

On Democracy (6 October 1884)

Weather, Country

“Fair and sweet is our Heavenly Mother in the sight of our souls; precious and lovely are the Gracious Children in the sight of our Heavenly Mother, with mildness and meekness, and all the fair virtues that belong to children in Nature. For of nature the Child despaireth not of the Mother’s love, of nature the Child presumeth not of itself, of nature the Child loveth the Mother and each one of the other. These are the fair virtues, with all other that be like, wherewith our Heavenly Mother is served and pleased.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

Summations, Chapter 63

Love, Children, Soul, Nature

“To every object there corresponds an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.”

Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) German philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology

Pure Phenomenology, 1917

Truth

“Martial force is the basis of all political virtues; in the rich treasure of Germany's glories the Prussian military glory is a jewel as precious, as loyally acquired as the masterpieces of our poets and our thinkers; the sacred character of the allegiance to the flag is a witness to the moral force of our people. Therefore let our Liberalism return to those ancient German convictions.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

Statement (1869), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. 59.

People

“The process of electing members of Parliament to represent the people is at the heart of western democracy. Fiji courts are also part of an independent judicial system which is firmly rooted in western democracy. The basic civil lesson that our children learn in school is that democracy is a government of the people, by the people, for the people … Mr Qarase should answer whether he wants the western system of governance which allows him to be prime minister or the Fijian tradition which requires the chiefs to rule by virtue of their birthright and rank. Otherwise, he is just being hypocritical to save face. (4 September 2005, reacting to a speech made by Qarase at the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association on 29 August, claiming that democracy was alien to Fiji).”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Miscellaneous quotes

Children, People, School, Democracy

“By serving wise and ignorant sadhus, I am learning the greatest of virtues, pleasing to God above all others — humility.”

Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895) Indian yogi and guru

Source: Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Ch. 34 : Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas

God, Learning

“I beg the reader not to go in search of messages. It is a term that I detest because it distresses me greatly, for it forces on me clothes that are not mine, which in fact belong to a human type that I distrust; the prophet, the soothsayer, the seer. I am none of these; I’m a normal man with a good memory who fell into a maelstrom and got out of it more by luck than by virtue, and who from that time on has preserved a certain curiosity about maelstroms large and small, metaphorical and actual.”

Primo Levi book The Mirror Maker

"The Premise," The Mirror Maker (1986)

Search, Memory, Time, Clothes

“What the Divine wants is for man to embody Him here, in the individual and in the collectivity… to realise God in life. The old system of yoga could not harmonise or unify Spirit and life; it dismissed the world as Maya or a transient play of God. The result has been a diminution of life-power and the decline of India. The Gita says, utsideyur ime loka na kuryam karma cedaham ["These peoples would crumble to pieces if I did not do actions," 3.24]. Truly 'these peoples' of India have gone to ruin. What kind of spiritual perfection is it if a few Sannyasins, Bairagis and Saddhus attain realisation and liberation, if a few Bhaktas dance in a frenzy of love, god-intoxication and Ananda, and an entire race, devoid of life, devoid of intelligence, sinks to the depths of extreme tamas?… But now the time has come to take hold of the substance instead of extending the shadow. We have to awaken the true soul of India and in its image fashion all works…. I believe that the main cause of India's weakness is not subjection, nor poverty, nor a lack of spirituality or Dharma, but a diminution of thought-power, the spread of ignorance in the motherland of Knowledge. Everywhere I see an inability or unwillingness to think… incapacity of thought or 'thought-phobia'…. The mediaeval period was a night, a time of victory for the man of ignorance; the modern world is a time of victory for the man of knowledge. It is the one who can fathom and learn the truth of the world by thinking more, searching more, labouring more, who will gain more Shakti. Look at Europe, and you will see two things: a wide limitless sea of thought and the play of a huge and rapid, yet disciplined force. The whole Shakti of Europe lies there. It is by virtue of this Shakti that she has been able to swallow the world, like our Tapaswins of old, whose might held even the gods of the universe in awe, suspense and subjection. People say that Europe is rushing into the jaws of destruction. I do not think so. All these revolutions, all these upsettings are the initial stages of a new creation….. We, however, are not worshippers of Shakti; we are worshippers of the easy way…. Our civilisation has become ossified, our Dharma a bigotry of externals, our spirituality a faint glimmer of light or a momentary wave of intoxication. So long as this state of things lasts, any permanent resurgence of India is impossible…. We have abandoned the sadhana of Shakti and so the Shakti has abandoned us…. You say what is needed is emotional excitement, to fill the country with enthusiasm. We did all that in the political field during the Swadeshi period; but all we did now lies in the dust…. Therefore I no longer wish to make emotional excitement, feeling and mental enthusiasm the base. I want to make a vast and heroic equality the foundation of my yoga; in all the activities of the being, of the adhar [vessel] based on that equality, I want a complete, firm and unshakable Shakti; over that ocean of Shakti I want the vast radiation of the sun of Knowledge and in that luminous vastness an established ecstasy of infinite love and bliss and oneness. I do not want tens of thousands of disciples; it will be enough if I can get as instruments of God a hundred complete men free from petty egoism. I have no faith in the customary trade of guru. I do not want to be a guru. What I want is that a few, awakened at my touch or at that of another, will manifest from within their sleeping divinity and realise the divine life. It is such men who will raise this country.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1920, Letter to Barin Ghose, Sri Aurobindo's brother, Translated from Bengali
India's Rebirth

Love, Life, Men, God

“I have decided to stop taking offense at the suggestion that we are buying influence. Now I simply concede the point. They are right. We do expect something in return. We expect to foster a conservative governing philosophy consisting of limited government and respect for traditional American virtues.”

Betsy DeVos (1958) 11th United States Secretary of Education

in Roll Call, 1997 BETSY DEVOS, TRUMP’S BIG-DONOR EDUCATION SECRETARY http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/betsy-devos-trumps-big-donor-education-secretary, The New Yorker (November 23, 2016)

“Gold is a living god and rules in scorn,
All earthly things but virtue.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto V
Queen Mab (1813)

God

“Boys today hardly aspire to immortal honor, the honor of self-fulfilling achievement. It is highly disapproved of in the code of the organized system. Instead, they devote themselves to protecting their “personal honor” against insults; and conversely they dream of the transient notoriety which will prove that they are “somebody,” which they doubt. The personal honor that they protect does not include truthfulness, honesty, public usefulness, integrity, independence, or virtues like that. A reputation for these things does not win respect, it has no publicity value; it’s believed to be phony anyway, and if it’s true, the person is hard to get along with.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), pp. 150-151.

Truth, Dreams, Boy, Personality

“If one defends the bourgeois, philistine virtues, one does not defend them merely from the demonism or bohemianism of the artist but from the present bourgeoisie itself.”

Lionel Trilling (1905–1975) American academic

Notebook entry (1951), published in Partisan Review: 50th Anniversary Edition, ed. William Philips (1985)

“She was by some standards slovenly, failing to see any virtue in made beds, since, as she put it, you are either asleep or somewhere else. On her birthdays she was sad. This tradition traced to earliest childhood, when she had consistently misinterpreted her birthday parties to mean that she was dying. Why else would the world be going to such exorbitant lengths to cheer her up?
Science was her first love. Long after the preschool years, she aspired to know the why of everything. Why babies had a Babinski reflex, and why the reflex disappeared. Why people licked their upper lips when concentrating, and why there was humor. Tez wanted to understand light. She wanted to solve mud, decipher rocks, and unlock grass.”

James K. Morrow (1947) (1947-) science fiction author

Source: The Wine of Violence (1981), Chapter 4 (p. 48)

Love, People, World, Sadness

“The true source of freedom is found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians believe it is he who fully discloses the human potential for virtue and goodness, and it is he who liberates us from sin and darkness.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Inter-religious Meeting (17 July 2008)

Freedom, Personality

“Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; 'tis for benevolence, and virtue, and honest fondness, one loves people; the other qualities make one proud of loving them too.”

Hester Thrale (1741–1821) Welsh author and salon-holder

Letter to Fanny Burney; Charlotte Barrett (ed.) Diary and Letters of Madame d'Arblay (1854) vol. 2, p. 3.

Love, Wisdom, People

“A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.”

John Jay Chapman (1862–1933) American author

Source: Practical Agitation (1900), Chapter 1

Way

“The moderns contended that the concentration on virtue contradicts the concern for well-being. Aristotle admitted that “equipment” as well as virtue is necessary for happiness, but he said nothing about how that equipment is acquired. A careful examination of the acquisition of equipment reveals that virtue impedes that acquisition. Liberality, for example, presupposes money and not caring for it overmuch. But one must care for it to get it. Moreover, spending money exhausts it, so that liberality makes the need for acquisitiveness greater than it would have been without the virtue. Liberality both discourages and encourages acquisitiveness, putting man in contradiction with himself. … The miser is not likely to need to steal. And his quest for profit can, properly channeled, produce benefits for others. In the old system he is given a bad conscience and a bad name. But it would seem that nature is not kind to man, if the two elements of happiness—virtue and equipment—are at tension with one another. Equipment is surely necessary, so why not experiment with doing without virtue? If a substitute for virtue can be found, the inner conflict that renders man’s life so hard could be resolved.”

Allan Bloom (1930–1992) American philosopher, classicist, and academician

“Commerce and Culture,” pp. 282-283.
Giants and Dwarfs (1990)

Life, Money, Happiness, Nature

“Discipline is the virtue that begins in obedience and flowers in self-control.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 32.

Flowers

“One obvious way to specify what it is that is “due” to someone is to appeal to existing legal codes, but what they will prescribe will vary enormously from one time and place to another. A second account of justice might appeal to some notion of merit or desert. The third approach is Aristotle’s “general” conception, which simply identified “justice” with the sum of all the virtues and excellences. A fourth conception of justice is the idea that justice is in some way to be connected to equality of shares, resources, or outcomes. Finally there is the idea of fairness or impartiality of procedure. One might think that Rawls’s view derives some of its apparent plausibility because of a gradual slide between the various senses of “justice.” People start from a vague intuition that justice as a “general” concept (in the third sense above) is extremely important for the proper functioning of a society; they then find it easy to shift from this to a particular conception that connects “justice” with fairness of procedure and (a certain kind of limited) equality.”

Raymond Geuss book Philosophy and Real Politics

Source: Philosophy and Real Politics (2008), pp. 81-82.

People, Justice, Way, Idea

“There is no more consensus on what justice means than there is on the character of the good. If anything, there is less. Among the virtues, justice is one of the most shaped by convention. For that reason it is among the most changeable.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Modus Vivendi' (p.34)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Justice

“These Names of Virtues with their Precepts were”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to Dulness. Drink not to Elevation.
2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or your self. Avoid trifling Conversation.
3. ORDER. Let all your Things have their Places. Let each part of your Business have its Time.
4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought. Perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no Expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e. Waste nothing.
6. INDUSTRY. Lose no Time. Be always employ'd in something useful. Cut off all unnecessary actions.
7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful Deceit. Think innocently and justly; and, if you speak, speak accordingly.
8. JUSTICE. Wrong none, by doing Injuries or omitting the Benefits that are your Duty.
9. MODERATION. Avoid Extremes. Forbear resenting Injuries so much as you think they deserve.
10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no Uncleanliness in Body, Clothes, or Habitation.
11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at Trifles, or at Accidents common or unavoidable.
12. CHASTITY. Rarely use Venery but for Health or Offspring; Never to Dulness, Weakness, or the Injury of your own or another's Peace or Reputation.
13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates. [Part II, pp. 67-68]
The last of Franklin's chart of 13 virtues: "My List of Virtues contain'd at first but twelve; but a Quaker Friend having kindly inform'd me that I was generally thought proud; … I determined endeavouring to cure myself if I could of this Vice or Folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my List..."
Part II, p. 75.
The Autobiography (1818)