Quotes about Virtue

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises. Saul had learned to do this. Paul the Apostle, much later, would have to learn the same lesson all over again.

Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.

Hope" in this sense is not a feeling. It is a virtue. You have to practice it, like a difficult piece on the violin or a tricky shot at tennis. You practice the virtue of hope through worship and prayer, through invoking the One God, through reading and reimagining the scriptural story, and through consciously holding the unknown future within the unshakable divine promises.

These four strengths of character—courage, restraint, cool judgment, and determination to do the right thing for others—are, in fact, precisely the four qualities which the greatest ancient philosopher who wrote about such matters identified as

The generous one-dimensional desire to be a hero, to 'do the right thing', needs to be rounded out with the equally generous willingness to restrain apparent heroism when it might itself bring disaster.

Virtue is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices requiring effort and concentration to do something which is good and right, but which doesn't come naturally. And then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what's required automatically. Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices become second nature.

The fruit of the Spirit is not spouse control or staff control or environmental control; it is self-control (see Gal. 5:23).

Character is how you treat people when they can do nothing for you.

It is a simple tale, but its message is an enduring one: virtue and generosity will be rewarded in ways that one cannot know.

The highest freedom is the freedom from evil, not the freedom of doing evil.

Virtue is what happens when wise and courageous choices have become second nature

Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody's going to know whether you did it or not.