Virtue Quotes

Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! Virtue is at hand.

Confucius, The Confucian Analects

The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.

Rene Descartes

If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind, you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation.

Xenophon

Virtue does not always demand a heavy sacrifice only the willingness to make it when necessary.

Frederick Sherwood Dunn

No company is preferable to bad, because we are more apt to catch the vices of others than their virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

C. C. Colton

Faith is the virtue of the storm, just as happiness is the virtue of sunshine.

Ruth Fulton Benedict

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy.

Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire

Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

Frank Zappa

If you live long enough, the venerability factor creeps in; first, you get accused of things you never did, and later, credited for virtues you never had.

I. F. Stone

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.

Cicero

The shortest and surest way to live with honour in the world, is to be in reality what we would appear to be and if we observe, we shall find, that all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice of them.

Socrates

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.

Horace, Epistles