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The Great Gatsby
Hamlet

Virtue Quotes

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

– George Orwell

1984. Part 2, Chapter 2. Winston is not concerned about the number of sexual partners Julia has had, he is attracted by her rebelliousness against the Party.

Virtue, perhaps, is nothing more than politeness of soul.

– Honore de Balzac

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

– George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman, Maxims for Revolutionists.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married

– George Bernard Shaw

Man and Superman, Act 3.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

– George Bernard Shaw

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

– Herman Melville

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

A ruler makes use of the majority and neglects the minority, and so he does not devote himself to virtue but to law.

– Han Fei

The chief virtue that language can have is clearness, and nothing detracts from it so much as the use of unfamiliar words.

– Hippocrates

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

– Horace Walpole

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

– Grover Norquist

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

– Hosea Ballou

I admit I can’t shake the idea that there is virtue in suffering, that there is a sort of psychic economy, whereby if you embrace success, happiness and comfort, these things have to be paid for.

– Hugh Laurie

Every faculty and virtue I possess can be used as an instrument with which to worry myself.

– Hale White

Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.

– Indira Gandhi

This idea of selfishness as a virtue, as opposed to generosity: That, to me, is unnatural.

– Jessica Lange

In ‘Reclaiming Virtue,’ I argue that we have had an element missing in moral education. That element is ‘affect.’ Affect is simply the technical word for feeling or emotion.

– John Bradshaw

Justice is the foremost virtue of the civilizing races. It subdues the barbarous nations, while injustice arouses the weakest.

– Jose Rizal

The person who talks most of his own virtue is often the least virtuous.

– Jawaharlal Nehru

God is the same God, always and everywhere. He is omnipresent not virtually only, but also substantially, for virtue cannot subsist without substance.

– Isaac Newton

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

– John Jay Chapman

Quite simply, quite plainly, just by virtue of his being, Obama is America. The first true American to lead our nation.

– John Ridley

Every act of virtue is an ingredient unto reward.

– Jeremy Taylor

I was brought up in an era when thrift was still considered a virtue.

– J. Paul Getty

Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.

– Jane Goodall

According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication.

– Irving Babbitt

The bread while becoming by virtue of Christ’s words the body of Christ does not cease to be bread.

– John Wycliffe

Good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue.

– Izaak Walton

In the long run, the public interest depends on private virtue.

– James Q. Wilson

Man is most happy, when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue.

– John Webster

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