When we exaggerate our friends tenderness towards us, it is often less from gratitude than from a desire to exhibit our own virtue.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
Francois de La Rochefoucauld
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue, but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Adrienne Herron
Tolerance it a tremendous virtue, but the immediate neighbors of tolerance are apathy and weakness.
James Goldsmith
Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.
Natalie Clifford Barney
Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
Samuel Butler
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.
Mark Twain
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency- and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency- and a vice.
Mark Twain
No power in society, no hardship in your condition can depress you, keep you down, in knowledge, power, virtue, influence, but by your own consent.
William Ellery Channing
Self denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
George Bernard Shaw
The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal.
Mark Twain
Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.
Henri Frederic Amiel
It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.â€
Voltaire
No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue; and by a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles.
Patrick Henry