Don Marquis Quotes

Virtue comes by nature, learning, and practice, and thanks to virtue, all of the aforesaid may deserve approval.

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, Which rests wholly upon yourself. So, to praise others for their virtues Can but encourage one's own efforts.

Knowing how bad you could be is a great encouragement to being good.

It is pleasant to be virtuous and good, because that is to excel many others; it is pleasant to grow better, because that is to excel ourselves; it is pleasant to mortify and subdue our lusts, because that is victory; it is pleasant to command our appetites and passions, and to keep them in due order within the bounds of reason and religion, because this is empire.

In the matter of learning, the difference between the earnest and the careless student stands out clearly. The same holds true in the mastering of passion and the weaknesses to which our nature is subject, as in the acquiring of virtue.

No evil propensity of the human heart is so powerful that it may not be subdued by discipline.

I've been deeply influenced by Aristotle's idea that virtue is a habit, something you practice and get better at, rather than something that comes naturally. 'The control of the appetites by right reason,' is how he defined it.

A man has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so.

The walls of that grand edifice called a good character have to be worked at during life.

Ethics is the activity of man directed to secure the inner perfection of his own personality.

The formation of one's character ought to be everyone's chief aim.

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself.

True virtue is life under the direction of reason.

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

Why cannot we correct the baneful passions, without weakening the good?

It is well to think well; it is divine to act well.

Good actions ennoble us, and we are the sons of our deeds.

Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will.

To be good, we must do good; and by doing good we take a sure means of being good, as the use and exercise of the muscles increase their power.

We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

Man is most happy, when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue.

It is by doing good that we become good.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat; Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.

Virtue does not consist in the absence of the passions, but in the control of them.