Quotes about Virtue

"Keep from prying into other people's affairs, for such prying gives occasion for slander, judgment, and other grievous sins. Why do you need to be concerned about others? Know and examine your own self." -- St. Tikhon
of Zadonsk

A man must practice good works for a long time, with great effort and determination, and "at last God comes, dwells within him and he in the Lord, and the Lord Himself sows His own commandments within him, filling him with spiritual fruit." - St. Marcarius the Great - Homily 19

Never lose your self-respect, nor be too familiar with yourself when you are alone. Let your integrity itself be your own standard of rectitude, and be more indebted to the severity of your own judgment of yourself than to all external percepts. Desist from unseemly conduct, rather out of respect for your own virtue than for the strictures of external authority.

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.

Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities

Love is the expression of one's values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another.

Only the brave know how to forgive; it is the most refined and generous pitch of virtue human nature can arrive at. 

Virtue would not go to such lengths if vanity did not keep her company.

    What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
    The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

Ego is vital but not noble.

He is man whose heart is spirited and eyes are wet each moment on account of the sorrow, compassion, virtue, beauty, and nobility that decorate this world.

In this world, not to be concerned with the pursuit of arete means to be doomed not just in the struggle with life but also in the struggle with other peoples: a people so facile, slack and fatuous as not to prepare to defend itself has already naively resolved to live out its existence as the enslaved subjects of others. War is omnipresent, to some a demoralizing eventual fate of all cities, and to others "the [Heraclitean] father of all things," i.e. the spur to all forms of virtue and excellence. We should be as energized and passionate about our commitment to our utmost values and self-culture as the warrior must be in learning the arts upon which his very life will depend.

Living in the modern age,
death for virtue is the wage.
So it seems in darker hours.
Evil wins, kindness cowers.

Ruled by violence and vice
we all stand upon thin ice.
Are we brave or are we mice,
here upon such thin, thin ice?

Dare we linger, dare we skate?
Dare we laugh or celebrate,
knowing we may strain the ice?
Preserve the ice at any price?

Always do the right thing.  This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

To see what is right, and not to do it, is want of courage or principle.

Virtue is my asylum.

One is not the victim of mentation but instead is the very originator by virtue of intention to extract projected value.  With this understanding, one is free from being dominated by the false "I" of the experiencer.

Virtue is virtue only when it is spontaneous; virtue is virtue only when it is natural, unpractised -- when it comes out of your vision, out of your awareness, out of your understanding.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

Every principle or virtue or form of intelligence and insight is always liable to peripeteia, i.e. to an utter reversal in value-polarities:  "freedom," "rationality," and all other banausically graspable and desirable "goods-in-abstracto" inevitably and eventually slue around to become malignancies, mind-eating and personality-snuffing cancers and obsessions.  Contrary to the delusions of Christian fideism and authoritarianism, values are inherently incapable of being presented or comprehended in an ABSOLUTE form:  a malignant or delusive mentality, a malformed personality or character, can SUBVERT anything-and of course conceal from itself utterly that it itself has such a warpage or privation.

Patience is a virtue.

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues

Maude: Vice, Virtue. It's best not to be too moral. You cheat yourself out of too much life. Aim above morality. If you apply that to life, then you're bound to live life fully.

The Tao has no place for pettiness, and nor has Virtue. Pettiness is dangerous to Virtue; pettiness is dangerous to the Tao. It is said, rectify yourself and be done.

Discipline enabled Heaven to be filled with light;
discipline enabled the angels to be immaculate and holy.

My description of wisdom has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is to do with being wise in one's own virtue, nothing more. My description of being has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is that one should be led by one's innate nature, nothing more.

Giving birth and nourishing,
Bearing yet not possessing,
Working yet not taking credit,
Leading yet not dominating,
This is the Primal Virtue.

Fame is not the glory, virtue is the goal, and fame only a messenger to bring more to the fold.

It is fitting for a great nation to yield.