Quotes about Virtue

There are different kinds of fear. One of the most terrible is the sensation that you are likely to become, at any moment, the protagonist in a Graham Greene novel: the man who tries to be virtuous and who is, in a certain sense, holy, and yet who is overwhelmed by sin as if there were a kind of fatality about it.

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.

Anger, [Evagrius] wrote, is given to us by God to help us confront true evil. We err when we use it casually, against other people, to gratify our own desires for power or control.

Who can be good, if not made so by loving? —St. Augustine

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.

Industry, thrift and self-control are not sought because they create wealth, but because they create character.

The love of money is the root of all virtue.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.