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Quotes about virtue

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If Virtue & Knowledge are diffus’d among the People, they will never be enslav’d. This will be their great Security.
Samuel Adams1722–1803Letter to James Warren (12 February 1779)
- Knowledge
I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist.
I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made me.
Fernando Pessoa1888–1935Álvaro de Campos (heteronym), “Começo a conhecer-me. Não existo.”, in Fernando Pessoa & Co: Selected Poems, trans. Richard Zenith (Grove Press, 1998)
- Character
The strongest natures, when they are influenced, submit the most unreservedly: it is perhaps a sign of their strength.
Virginia Woolf1882–1941Books and Portraits (1977), “Thoreau”
- Character
Reason is not the sole basis of moral virtue in man. His social impulses are more deeply rooted than his rational life.
Reinhold Niebuhr1892–1971Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), p.26
- Morality
I am convinced that everyone can develop a good heart and a sense of universal responsibility with or without religion.
Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lamaborn 1935Nobel acceptance speech (1989)
- Religion
- Responsibility
Be not as one that hath ten thousand years to live; death is nigh at hand: while thou livest, while thou hast time, be good.
Marcus Aurelius121–180Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Meditations. iv. 17.
- Life & Death
We Americans write our own history. And the chapters of which we’re proudest are the ones where we had the courage to change.
Al Goreborn 1948Speech at the Democratic National Convention (28 August 1996).
What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.
John Ruskin1819–1900The Crown of Wild Olive (1866)
- Character
- Wisdom
The brave man inattentive to his duty, is worth little more to his country, than the coward who deserts her in the hour of danger.
Andrew Jackson1767–1845To troops who had abandoned their lines during the Battle of New Orleans (8 January 1815).
- Courage
- Responsibility
The water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven.
John Ruskin1819–1900The King of the Golden River (1841), Ch. 5
- Charity
I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper’s wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?
Mother Teresa1910–1997Statement of 1977, as quoted in Concise Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (2011) by Susan Ratcliffe, p. 373
- Charity
- God
Let us be firm, pure and faithful; at the end of our sorrow, there is the greatest glory of the world, that of the men who did not give in.
Charles de Gaulle1890–1970Speech, July 14 1943.
- Courage
- Honor
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others.
Robert F. Kennedy1925–1968On the Mindless Menace of Violence (1968)
- Charity
- Morality
Men of all countries are brothers, and the different peoples should help one another according to their ability like citizens of the same state.
Maximilien Robespierre1758–1794Proposed Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, speech to the National Convention (24 April 1793)
- Charity
- Politics
Humility, a sense of reverence before the sons of heaven — of all the prizes that a mortal man might win, these, I say, are wisest; these are best.
Euripides481–407 BCThe Bacchae, ll. 1150-1152 (tr. William Arrowsmith, 1958)
- Wisdom