Never sacrifice what’s right for what’s convenient.

If you’re early, you’re on time. If you’re on time, you’re late.

A man’s shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself.

Assertion is a virtue, dominance is a vice.

Good philosophy is always hate speech to evil doers.

It is politics to please and hoodwink thoseWho flatter but despise us.

Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than the rule.

Most men—it is my experience—are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She’s earned it, it’s a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her...

You know Mildred would never do anything wrong or foolish. I reflected a little sadly that this was only too true and hoped I did not appear too much that kind of person to others....

Every skill and every inquiry, and similarly every action and rational choice, is thought to aim at some good; and so the good had been aptly described as that at which everything aims.

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?

It is an occult law moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the...

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child – let that be your word concerning virtue!

In monarchies, each man’s desire to do what was right in his own eyes could be restrained by beer, or force, by patronage, or by honor, and by professional standing armies. By contrast, republics had...

The challenge for people today–and it is not and easy one–is to maintain high personal standards even while feeling that one is living in a moral sewer.

May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity – a virtuous woman.

Victory and defeat are but ordinary events in a soldier’s career, and why should you give up?

loving for their mere artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin.

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

When the rare chance comes, seize itTo do the rare deed.

But I was born in the image of God, a man, a creator, with power of life and death, a father, blessed with the gift of the seed of Adam, a sower of seed, to...

The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life.

self-preservation is the primary and only foundation of virtue.

Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

Now that the wars are coming to an end, I wish you to prosper in peace. May all mortals from now on live like one people in concord and for mutual advancement. Consider the world...

Faith is the surrender of the mind, it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other animals. It’s our need to believe and to surrender our...

Virtue alone has majesty in death.

Honor must start in the heart, but if it ends there, it isn’t honor. Honor must be expressed through words, symbols, actions, or gestures. Honor is among the most incarnational of the virtues. It must...

No place is ugly to those who understand the virtues and sweetness of everything that God has made.

Ancient politicians talked incessantly about morality and virtue; our politicians talk only about business and money. One will tell you that in a particular country a man is worth the sum he could be sold...

I know, brother, that you are a straightforward man, and that you pride yourself on it. But put one question to yourself: why in fact should one tell the truth? What obliges us to do...

Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.

The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Power does not justify sin. Power is not virtue. Virtue is that which lasts inspite of power

Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.

I swear that while I live I will do what little I can to preserve and to augment the liberties of man, woman, and child.It is a question of justice, of mercy, of honesty, of...

You say that Caesar Borgia suffered the just punishment of his crimes. He was destroyed not by his misdeeds, but by circumstances over which he had no control. His wickedness was an irrelevant accident. In...

Virtue – to be good and just -Every heart, when sifted well,Is a clot of warmer dust,Mix’d with cunning sparks of hell.- The Vision of Sin

One should always be drunk. That’s all that matters…But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk.

An industrious mother is an initiator of a good course; always charting new course for her loved ones.

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

We understand and recognize what is good, but we do not labor to bring it to fulfillment, some of us out of laziness, some because we put something else, some pleasure, before virtue–and there are...

Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let...

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is,...

To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.

I want to be a transitory fallen, lifted up by virtues every time.

Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can...

Ah, EugTnie, have done with virtues! Among the sacrifices that can be made to those counterfeit divinities, is there one worth an instant of the pleasures one tastes in outraging them?