genuine virtue Quotes

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

Virtue is its own reward, and brings with it the truest and highest pleasure; but if we cultivate it only for pleasure's sake, we are selfish, not religious, and will never gain the pleasure, because we can never have the virtue.

When real nobleness accompanies that imaginary one of birth, the imaginary seems to mix with real, and becomes real too.

It is easier to be virtuous than it is to appear so, and it pays better.

How wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so called. Give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds,--which God has seen to be good, and let be.

Deliberate virtue is never worth much: The virtue of feeling or habit is the thing.

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

It is easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement.

It is all a mistake that we cannot be good and manly without being scrupulously and studiously good. There is too much mechanism about our virtue.

Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so.

Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation. Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

Popularity is a crime from the moment it is sought; it is only a virtue where men have it whether they will or no.

Since every man is obliged to promote happiness and virtue, he should be careful not to mislead unwary minds, by appearing to set too high a value upon things by which no real excellence is conferred.

True greatness is sovereign wisdom. We are never deceived by our virtues.