If you plan to build a tall house of virtues, you must first lay deep foundations of humlilty.
– Augustine
Humility | Virtue
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue | Power
Virtue-even attempted virtue-brings light; indulgence brings fog.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue | Light
Many things are possible for the person who has hope. Even more is possible for the person who has faith. And still more is possible for the person who knows how to love. But everything is possible for the person who practices all three virtues.
– Brother Lawrence
Virtue
Men are not made religious by performing certain actions which are externally good, but they must first have righteous principles, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.
– Martin Luther
Religion | Virtue | Men
The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.
– George Washington
Virtue | Foolishness
Beauty without virtue is like a flower without fragrance.
– Woodrow Kroll
Beauty | Virtue
These then are the marks of the ideal Church – love, suffering, holiness, sound doctrine, genuineness, evangelism and humility. They are what Christ desires to find in His churches as He walks among them.
– John Stott
Virtue
Do not fear the conflict, and do not flee from it; where there is no struggle, there is no virtue.
– John of Kronstadt
Struggles | Virtue
The most virtuous of all men, says Plato, is he that contents himself with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.
– Francois Fenelon
Virtue | Men
Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
– George Washington
Virtue | Men
What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer’s cross and in the power of his resurrection.
– Frederick W. Robertson
Virtue | Excellence | Resurrection
Consider how impossible nobility of character would be if our goodness were untried innocence instead of victorious virtue.
– Harry Emerson Fosdick
Character | Virtue | Victory
Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.
– Francis Bacon
Virtue
Sordid and infamous sensuality, the most dreadful evil that issued from the box of Pandora, corrupts the entire heart and eradicates every virtue.
– Francois Fenelon
Sin | Virtue | The Heart
Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them.
– Thomas Aquinas
Virtue | Immorality
Adulation is the death of virtue. Who flatters, is, of all mankind, the lowest, save he who courts the flattery.
– Hannah More
Virtue
Humility is a virtue all preach, none practice, and yet everybody is content to hear. The master thinks it good doctrine for his servant, the laity for the clergy, and the clergy for the laity.
– John Selden
Virtue | Preaching
We need to teach our kids that misconduct bears–or at least should bear–a cost. Our personal ethics should not be attached to who is affected by what we believe.
– Jonathan Falwell
Virtue
God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.
– William Law
Mercy | Virtue
Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world.
– Isaac Watts
Virtue | God
Throw away thy rod, throw away thy wrath; O my God, take the gentle path.
– George Herbert
Virtue
Even to earnest minds the difficulty of grasping the truth at all has always proved extreme. Philosophically, one scarcely sees either the necessity or the possibility of being born again. Why a virtuous man should not simply grow better and better until in his own right he enter the Kingdom of God is what thousands honestly and seriously fail to understand.
– Henry Drummond
Virtue
But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.
– Edmund Burke
Virtue | Wisdom | Liberty
Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.
– Charles Kingsley
Diligence | Self-control | Virtue
God never approves sexual union outside of marriage.
– Max Lucado
Virtue
Humility is the foundation of all the other virtues hence, in the soul in which this virtue does not exist there cannot be any other virtue except in mere appearance.
– Augustine
Humility | Virtue
I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.
– George Washington
Virtue | Honesty
Influence never dies; every act, emotion, look and word makes influence tell for good or evil, happiness or woe, through the long future of eternity.
– Thomas a Kempis
Virtue | Eternity
We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness – today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve, but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own.
– William Law
PrideGriefVirtue
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.
– John Henry Newman
Virtue
Virtue, morality, and religion. This is the armor, my friend, and this alone that renders us invincible. These are the tactics we should study. If we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed, so long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.
– Assorted Authors
Virtue
Gratitude is the mother of all the virtues.
– G.K. Chesterton
Virtue
Being virtuous is no feat once temptation ceases.
– Assorted Authors
Virtue | Temptation
If we are to have values at all we must accept the ultimate platitudes of Practical Reason as having absolute validity.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue
Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Virtue
To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations.
– William Penn
VirtueOvercoming
I will tell you what to hate. Hate hypocrisy; hate cant; hate intolerance, oppression, injustice, Pharisaism; hate them as Christ hated them – with a deep, abiding, God-like hatred.
– Frederick W. Robertson
VirtueHatred
Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.
– Augustine
VirtueCharacter
In what light soever we regard the Bible, whether with reference to revelation, to history, or to morality, it is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.
– John Quincy Adams
The Bible | Virtue
There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.
– Francois Fenelon
Virtue | Doctrine
Every act of virtue is an ingredient unto reward.
– Jeremy Taylor
Virtue | Rewards
Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them.
– Thomas Aquinas
Virtue | Passion
All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
Virtue | Women
Expedients are for the hour, but principles are for the ages.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Virtue
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue
When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayer should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a method of good and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty. By what we require of God we see what he requires of us.
– Jeremy Taylor
Prayer | Virtue
The aggregate happiness of society, which is best promoted by the practice of a virtuous policy, is, or ought to be, the end of all government.
– George Washington
Government | Virtue | Happiness
Judge of thine improvement, not by what thou speakest or writest, but by the firmness of thy mind, and the government of thy passions and affections.
– Thomas Fuller
Virtue | Discretion | Judging
The virtue of a coward is suspicion.
– George Herbert
Virtue
Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.
– George Washington
Virtue
It is no small happiness to attend those from whom we may receive precepts and examples of virtue.
– Joseph Hall
Virtue
The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number. So blinded are we to our passions, that we suffer more to insure perdition than salvation.
– Hannah More
Virtue | Apathy | Endurance
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
– C.S. Lewis
Ignorance | Virtue
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
– C.S. Lewis
Virtue
To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue.
– Hannah More
Virtue
True piety hath in it nothing weak, nothing sad, nothing constrained. It enlarges the heart; it is simple, free, and attractive.
– Francois Fenelon
Virtue | The Heart | Piety
Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.
– Hosea Ballou
Virtue
By gambling we lose both our time and treasure, two things most precious to the life of man.
– Owen Feltham
Virtue
In conversation use some, but not too much ceremony; it teaches others to be courteous, too. Demeanors are commonly paid back in their own coin.
– Thomas Fuller
Virtue | Discretion
We are apt to mistake our vocation in looking out of the way for occasions to exercise great and rare virtues, and stepping over the ordinary ones which lie directly in the road before us.
– Hannah More
Virtue | Vocation
The world dares say no more for its device, than “while I live, I hope”; but the children of God can add by virtue of a living hope, “while I expire, I hope.”
– Robert Leighton
Virtue | Death
Joy is love exalted; peace is love in repose; long-suffering is love enduring; gentleness is love in society; goodness is love in action; faith is love on the battlefield; meekness is love in school; and temperance is love in training.
– Dwight L. Moody
Virtue
People must have righteous principals in the first, and then they will not fail to perform virtuous actions.
– Martin Luther
Virtue | Righteousness
The blush is nature’s alarm at the approach of sin, and her testimony to the dignity of virtue.
– Thomas Fuller
Sin | Virtue
Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.
– G.K. Chesterton
Virtue
Temperance is reason’s girdle, and passion’s bride, the strength of the soul, and the foundation of virtue.
– Jeremy Taylor
Virtue | Strength
Moderation is the silken string running through the pearl chain of all virtues.
– Joseph Hall
Virtue
Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man’s own will.
– Thomas Aquinas
Happiness | Virtue
Vices are as truly contrary to each other as to virtue.
– Thomas Fuller
Virtue
The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.
– G.K. Chesterton
Virtue
Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
– William Cowper
Virtue
Recommend to your children virtue; that alone can make them happy, not gold.
– Assorted Authors
Children | Virtue
Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its utmost of possible achievement — these are the martial virtues which must command success.
– Austin Phelps
Virtue | Success
The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.
– Assorted Authors
Virtue
Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all.
– G.K. Chesterton
Love | Virtue
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
– G.K. Chesterton
Virtue
Modesty is the appendage of sobriety, and is to chastity, to temperance, and to humility as the fringes are to a garment.
– Jeremy Taylor
Virtue | Modesty
Half our virtue arises from our being out of the way of temptation.
– Thomas Adams
Virtue
How weak a thing is gentility, if it wants virtue!
– Thomas Fuller
Virtue
Virtues go ever in troops; so thick that sometimes some are hid in the crowd, which yet are virtues though they appear not.
– Joseph Hall
Virtue
True pleasure is the companion and associate of virtue.
– Assorted Authors
Virtue
The defects of a preacher are soon spied. Let him be endued with ten virtues, and have but one fault, and that one fault will eclipse and darken all his virtues and gifts, so evil is the world in these times.
– Martin Luther
Preaching | Virtue
Reputation is rarely proportioned to virtue.
– Francis de Sales
Virtue
Policies are many, Principles are few, Policies will change, Principles never do.
– John C. Maxwell
Virtue
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
Virtue