Simple Virtue Quotes

Heroes are people who rise to the occasion and slip quietly away.

Simple honesty is so remarkable a quality. It is of the very essence of Integrity.

One day, a daughter of Aristotle, Pythias by name, was asked what color pleased her most. She replied, "The color with which modesty suffuses the face of simple, inoffensive men.

Courage is the most common and vulgar of the virtues.

What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.

On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

Simple, genuine goodness is the best capital to found the business of this life upon. It lasts when fame and money fail, and is the only riches we can take out of this world with us.

I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.