Virtuous Behavior Quotes

In doing good, we are generally cold, and languid, and sluggish; and of all things afraid of being too much in the right. But theworks of malice and injustice are quite in another style. They are finished with a bold, masterly hand; touched as they are with the spirit of those vehement passions that call forth all our energies, whenever we oppress and persecute.

Two great duties which every citizen of proper age owes the republic: a wise and virtuous exercise of the right of suffrage; and a prompt and brave defense of the country in the hours of danger.

If thou do ill, the joy fades, not the pains. If well, the pain doth fade, the joy remains.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

When you see a good man, think of emulating him; when you see a bad man, examine your own heart.

We have next to consider the formal definition of virtue.

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

Rightness in our choice of an end is secured by [Moral] Virtue.

Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! Virtue is at hand.

If they are just, they are better than clever.

It's impossible to speak what it is not noble to do.

No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such

I think good things come to good people.

It is never right to do wrong in order to get a chance to do right.

Christian liberty is freedom from sin, not freedom to sin.

We cannot be truly Christian people so long as we flaunt the central teachings of Jesus: brotherly love and the Golden Rule.

It appears evident, therefore, that those actions only can truly be called virtuous, and deserving of moral approbation, which the agent believed to be right, and to which he was influenced, more or less, by that belief.

The superior man is quiet and calm, waiting for the appointments of heaven, while the mean man walks in dangerous paths, looking for lucky occurrences.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.

I do believe that when you are a good person, good things will happen to you.

You may depend upon it, religion is, in its essence, the most gentlemanly thing in the world. It will alone gentilize, if unmixed with cant; and I know nothing else that will, alone. Certainly not the army, which is thought to be the grand embellisher of manners.

No man of honor, as the word is usually understood, did ever pretend that his honor obliged him to be chaste or temperate, to pay his creditors, to be useful to his country, to do good to mankind, to endeavor to be wise or learned, to regard his word, his promise, or his oath.

It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honorable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues. We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber.