C. S. Lewis on virtue

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one!’

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

Aristotle384–322 BC

• Courage

To err is human, to forgive divine.

Alexander Pope1688–1744An Essay on Criticism (1711)In context

• Forgiveness

Cowards die many times before their deaths. The valiant never taste of death but once.

William Shakespeare1564–1616Julius Caesar (1599), Act II, scene ii.In context

• Courage