Virtue Quotes

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth

William Hazlitt

Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue

FranÁois de la Rochefoucauld

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

A life in harmony with nature, the love of truth and virtue, will purge the eyes to understanding her text

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation, all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erects an absolute monarchy in the minds of men...the master of superstition is the people; and arguments are fitted to practice, in a reverse order

Sir Francis Bacon

The belief in potential human virtue underlies the whole idea of the Bill of Rights; the document is a very tough guardian of that belief

Roger Rosenblatt

The use of this feigned history hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it, the world being in proportion inferior to the soul; by reason whereof there is, agreeable to the spirit of man, a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical: because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence: because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary, and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations: so as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind into the nature of things.

Francis Bacon

Christian soldiers armed with virtue- hearts afire with blind obsession, cannot see the difference 'twixt compassion and oppression

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Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

Henry David Thoreau

Charity is a virtue of the heart, and not of the hands.

Joseph Addison

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtue, not vices. It is this superlatively moral system that the welfare statists propose to improve upon by means of preventative law, snooping bureaucrats, and the chronic goad of fear.

Alan Greenspan

The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.

Winston Churchill

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.

Voltaire

There is no virtue like necessity.

William Shakespeare

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

Honore de Balzac