I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.
Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
We need greater virtues to sustain good than evil fortune.
Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
Truth is the secret of eloquence and of virtue, the basis of moral authority; it is the highest summit of art and of life.
If ignorance and passion are the foes of popular morality, it must be confessed that moral indifference is the malady of the cultivated classes. The modern separation of enlightenment and virtue, of thought and conscience, of the intellectual aristocracy from the honest and common crowd is the greatest danger that can threaten liberty.
Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report: if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
..the virtue of a man consists in managing the cityâs affairs capably, and so that he will help his friends and injure his foes while taking care to come to no harm himself. Or if you want a womanâs virtue, that is easily described. She must be a good housewife, careful with her stores and obedient to her husband.
There is no virtue if there is no immortality.
The virtue of a historical novel is in its vice - the flatfooted affirmation of possibility as fact.
The best-selling formula for our times insists on the combination of frank sex and technical information. The reader enjoys the sex, and, if he feels any shame in this, it can dissolve in a sense of virtue that he is learning how an airport is run, or a bank, or the White House, or a nuclear installation.
There is no virtue of itself in age
The universe exists and somebody had to make it. The whole complex movement of the universe represents order. The Creator loves order and hates chaos. Virtue is order. Sin is chaos ... The sinner often doesn't understand the extent to which he destroys order ... The soul dedicated to order joins the ultimate divine order
Where your entire love is, namely, with your child, there is also your entire virtue!
To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge, virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by degrees, a pot is filled.
My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.
Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
Practice no vice because it's trivial. Neglect no virtue because it's so.
The first virtue is to restrain the tongue; he approaches nearest to the gods who knows how to be silent, even though he is in the right.
Let this be an example for the acquisition of all knowledge, virtue, and riches. By the fall of drops of water, by degrees, a pot is filled.
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.