Quotes about Virtue

A strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the highest virtues of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to written law would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the end to the means.

God grant that men of principle shall be our principal men.

It be urged that the wild and uncultivated tree, hitherto yielding sour and bitter fruit only, can never be made to yield better; yet we know that the grafting art implants a new tree on the savage stock, producing what is most estimable in kind and degree. Education, in like manner, engrafts a new man on the native stock, and improves what in his nature was vicious and perverse into qualities of virtue and social worth.

Everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue.

The contest is not between Us and Them, but between Good and Evil, and if those who would fight Evil adopt the ways of Evil, Evil wins.

Perceiving the order of nature to be that individual happiness shall be inseparable from the practice of virtue, I am willing to hope it may have ordained that the fall of the wicked shall be the rise of the good. To J. Correa de Serra, Monticello, Apr. 19, 1814

Liberty is the parent of science and of virtue, and a nation will be great in both in proportion as it is free.

As a matter of fact, it is often harder to manifest the good that is in us than the evil.

Humility is a virtue, not a neurosis.

To be an acorn is to have a taste for being an oak tree. Habitual grace brings with it all the Christian virtues in their seed.

Nothing is more suspicious, in a man who seems holy, than an impatient desire to reform other men.

Humility is the surest sign of strength.