Topics/Virtue
276 quotes from 175 people
It contributes greatly towards a man’s moral and intellectual health to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.
To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
Simple, sincere people seldom speak much of their piety; it shows itself in acts, rather than in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations.
The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself.
He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own acts with doubtful side-glances.
Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.
“Oh, no, my dear; I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard, I must admit.”
Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.
Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?
It takes all sorts to make a world.
It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
She was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.
Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!
I am in truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and incomprehensible to him.
Let me have men about me that are fat, Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
