Top 1200 Moral Virtues Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating: they can breathe it.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection admits a sacrifice.

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

Virtually all the trends that matter are making a mockery of the industry's ritual incantations about the values and virtues of a free press in a free society.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

The great pleasure that comes from reading poets such as Mark Doty and Marianne Moore is the realisation that the essential virtues - compassion, wonder, humility, respect for the mysterious - are far from conventionally heroic.

Virtues, like viruses, have their seasons of contagion. When catastrophe strikes, generosity spikes like a fever. Courage spreads in the face of tyranny.

I have a tendency, after a play of mine is produced, to look back on it disparagingly, seeing only its faults; before production, I see only its virtues.

We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults reconcile us to their virtues.

In the greatest fiction, the writer's moral sense coincides with his dramatic sense, and I see no way for it to do this unless his moral judgement is part of the very act of seeing, and he is free to use it. I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.

Diversity is not a virtue. Diversity is a good only to the extent that it advances other virtues, justice or inclusiveness of others who have previously been excluded.

The business of life summons us away from useless grief, and calls us to the exercise of those virtues of which we are lamenting our deprivation.

Therefore it is most expedient for the wise, if Don Worm (his conscience) find no impediment to the contrary, to be the trumpet of his own virtues, as I am to myself.

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

When you're young, you get blamed for crimes that you didn't commit. When you are old, you get credit for virtues that you never had. I guess it all evens out in the end.

I neither drink nor smoke, because my schoolmaster impressed upon me three cardinal virtues; cleanliness in person, cleanliness in mind; temperance.

For India's economy to expand as rapidly and yet more sustainably than China's, we need to make our differences into virtues rather than vulnerabilities.

It is rational to choose the right means to your ends to develop very elegant abstract formal theories of rational choice, and then turn these into what look like moral theories. Philosophers tend to be ravished by the formal beauty of such theories, and they don't pay much attention to the fact that our human limitations make them pretty useless in practice, while the simple point about instrumental reasoning is too shallow to be of much real moral interest.

there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.

The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.

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.

Environmental history was . . . born out of a moral purpose, with strong political commitments behind it, but also became, as it matured, a scholarly enterprise that had neither any simple, nor any single, moral or political agenda to promote. Its principal goal became one of deepening our understanding of how humans have been affected by their natural environment through time and, conversely, how they have affected that environment and with what results.

The government of a country never gets ahead of the religion of a country. There is no way by which we can substitute the authority of the law for the virtues of men.

... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

If a Jew is fascinated by Christians it is not because of their virtues, which he values little, but because they represent anonymity, humanity without race.

I am thankful for the adversities, which have crossed my pathway, for they taught me tolerance, sympathy, self-control, perseverance and some other virtues I might never have known.

When you live the virtues - when you live in that place of God-consciousness - all these rules we have about cause and effect, beginnings and ends, don't have any impact or relevance.

Humility, as we all know, is one of those virtues that is never gained by seeking it. The more we pursue it the more distant it becomes. To think we have it is sure evidence that we don't.

It is an assumption that there is always one single dimension for assessing persons and their actions that has canonical priority. This is the dimension of moral evaluation; "good/evil" is supposed always to trump any other form of evaluation, but that is an assumption, probably the result of the long history of the Christianisation and then gradual de-Christianisation of Europe, which one need not make. Evaluation need not mean moral evaluation, but might include assessments of efficiency, ... simplicity, perspicuousness, aesthetic appeal, and so on.

Our great mistake is to try to exact from each person virtues which he does not possess, and to neglect the cultivation of those which he has.

Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues - faith and hope.

If everyone were clothed with integrity, if every heart were just, frank, kindly, the other virtues would be well-nigh useless.

Sometimes your mistakes are you biggest virtues. You learn so much from the mistake. Those things that you think are the worst thing that's happening to you can somehow turn around and be the greatest opportunity.

The orchid's association in Chinese culture with such virtues as elegance, good taste, friendship, and fertility goes all the way back to Confucius himself, who was said to have a particular attachment to the flowers.

All great virtues become great men.

Conservatives say the government can't end poverty by force, but they believe it can use force to make people moral. Liberals say government can't make people be moral, but they believe it can end poverty. Neither group attempts to explain why government is so clumsy and destructive in one area but a paragon of efficiency and benevolence in the other.

Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.

Cheerfulness is among the most laudable virtues. It gains you the good will and friendship of others. It blesses those who practice it and those upon whom it is bestowed.

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance--he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.

While we are indifferent to our good qualities, we keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we come to look on them as virtues.

Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.

Our vices are the excesses of our virtues.

Most areas of intellectual life have discovered the virtues of speculation, and have embraced them wildly. In academia, speculation is usually dignified as theory.

When we recognise the virtues, the talent, the beauty of Mother Earth, something is born in us, some kind of connection, love is born.

Can't I another's face commend, Or to her virtues be a friend, But instantly your forehead louers, As if her merit lessen'd yours?

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

I often think a lot of women's attraction to vampires is based on the fact that vampires come from centuries ago, from eras of chivalry and courtly virtues.

Stimulate the heart to love and the mind to be early accurate, and all other virtues will rise of their own accord, and all vices will be thrown out.

The first of all virtues is innocence; the next is modesty. If we banish modesty out of the world, she carries away with her half the virtue that is in it.

What intrigued me most was not the technology as such but the questions about the human goods, the fundamental human values and virtues that are raised by debates over biotechnology.

Charity and good-nature give a sanction to the most common actions; and pride and ill-nature make our best virtues despicable.

Chastity prays for me, piety sings, Innocence sweetens my last black breath, Modesty hides my thighs in her wings, And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Judge not of actions by their mere effect; Dive to the center, and the cause detect. Great deeds from meanest springs may take their course, And smallest virtues from a mighty source.

You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

The pearl whose possession separates man from beast, the pearl which is the rarest find - the best among virtues - is forgiveness.

Conductors make too much fuss about conductors! Humility and hard work are virtues. We're nothing without our musicians.

The system of capitalism, of the market economy, is a system of freedom, of justice, of productivity. But these three virtues cannot be separated. Each flows out of the other.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

Until we are renewed in the spirit of our mind and illumined in every part, our very virtues are but taught practices grafted upon a corrupt bottom