Quotes About Virtue

Virtue, like a dowerless beauty, has more admirers than followers.

— Marguerite, Countess of Blessington

Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure.

— William Saroyan

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency—and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency—and a vice.

— Mark Twain

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

— George Washington

Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.

— Cornelia Otis Skinner

Ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.

— Alan Paton

It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing—I used to be a good boy.

— Mark Twain

He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.

— John 8:7

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

— James 4:7

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

— Mark Twain

There is a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue.

— Edmund Burke

Women are not virtuous, but they have given us the idea of virtue.

— Paul Geraldy

Only the young die good.

— Oliver Herford

The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Be not simply good; be good for something.

— Henry David Thoreau

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

— George Bernard Shaw

The more virtuous any man is, the less easily does he suspect others to be vicious.

— Cicero

And what is a weed?  A plant whose virtues have not been discovered.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

— Henry David Thoreau

To abstain from sin when a man cannot sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it.

— St. Augustine