Quotes about Virtue

Honesty is more than not lying. It is truth telling, truth speaking, truth living, and truth loving.

Seek to do good, and you will find that happiness will run after you.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Few are guided by principle any longer, only by what they prefer. "You have to decide what's right for you," we are told. In such a climate, the only remaining virtue is tolerance, and the only philosophies that are wrong are those that believe in truth.

Damn it, she writes detective stories and in detective stories virtue is always triumphant. They're the purest literature we have.

Detachment is a rare virtue, and very few people find it lovable, either in themselves or in others. If you ever find a person who likes you in spite of it-still more, because of it-that liking has very great value, because it is perfectly sincere, and because, with that person, you will never need to be anything but sincere yourself.

Here again, the souls 'have what they chose'; they enjoy that kind of after-life which they themselves imagined for the virtuous dead; their failure lay in not imagining better. They are lost because they 'had not faith' — primarily the Christian faith, but also, more generally, faith in the nature of things.

The memory of a good deed lives.

The safeguards of virtue are hateful to the evil disposed.

They that know how to suspect, without exposing or hurting themselves, till honesty comes to be more in fashion, can never suspect too much.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.