Virtuously Quotes & Sayings

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. — Alasdair MacIntyre

Your endurance is strongly influenced by
your fundamental myth about the fighting. — Toba Beta

If they show themselves disposed to accept their proper position I will assist them to start virtuously in life by a present of one hundred pounds each. This sum I authorize you to pay them, on their personal application, with the necessary acknowledgment of receipt; and on the express understanding that the transaction, so completed, is to be the beginning and the end of my connection with them. The — Wilkie Collins

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. — Iris Murdoch

Once I no longer exist as I am, out of what consideration then should I forgo anything? Should I belong to a man I don't love simply because I used to love him? No, I forgo nothing, I love any man who appeals to me and I make any man who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it is at least far more beautiful than my cruelly delighting in the tortures incited by my charms and my virtuously turning my back on the poor man who pines away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and just as I am, I live cheerfully for pleasure and enjoyment. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God. — Thomas Aquinas

Who's gonna dare to be great? — Muhammad Ali

The Republican majority, left to its own devices from 1995 to 2000, was a party committed to limited government and restoring the balances of federalism with the states. Clearly, President Bush has had a different vision, and that vision has resulted in education and welfare policies that have increased the size and scope of government. — Mike Pence

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, "My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too." I imagined Phil's mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil's food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father's late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn't help, it would just make the checks even later. "It's a vicious circus," Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation - the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling - might help, he said, "I'm virtuously certain it wouldn't," looking martyred and older than his years. — Laura Kasischke

The eyes closed. Cammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk of this city's waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing, what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets uncovered? What voices overheard, flinders of luminescent gods glimpsed among the wallpaper's stained foliage, candlestubs lit to rotate in the air over him, prefiguring the cigarette he or a friend must fall asleep someday smoking, thus to end among the flaming, secret salts held all those years by the insatiable stuffing of a mattress that could keep vestiges of every nightmare sweat, helpless overflowing bladder, viciously, tearfully consummated wet dream, like the memory bank to a computer of the lost? She was overcome all at once by a need to touch him, as if she could not believe in him, or would not remember him, without it. — Thomas Pynchon

Karma moves in two directions. If we act virtuously, the seed we plant will result in happiness. If we act non-virtuously, suffering results. — Sakyong Mipham

Mrs. Jaffee a little earlier. I asked if he was escorting Mrs. Jaffee. "Certainly," he said virtuously. "She is my client. What's that noise you're making?" "It's something special," I told him, "and takes a lot of practice. Don't try it offhand. It's a derisive chortle. — Rex Stout

The unvarnished truth is that a trained dog is a perishable commodity. Few things are so subject to deterioration. It is almost as hard-and it takes almost as good a hunter-to keep a dog good as to make one as good. Eternal vigilance is the price of a good bird dog, regardless of who you are, or where and how virtuously you live. — Havilah Babcock

Apple smiled. She could play the damsel-in-distress like a cow could jump over a moon. The male species couldn't resist wanting to help her. — Shannon Hale

Live simply and virtuously, true to your nature, drawing no line between what is spiritual and what is not. — Laozi

Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing. — Sinclair Lewis

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. — Kenneth Clark

Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don't bother about life or honor ... and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour. — Michelangelo

Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. — Hugh Nibley

That old man dies prematurely whose memory records no benefits conferred. They only have lived long who have lived virtuously. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact it's like men and women, yin and yang: you need both. — Emmanuel Carrere

Unlike Confucius, Madison maintained that people have a limited capacity to control their passions themselves and act virtuously when their individual interests conflict with others. — Patrick Mendis

If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness
to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Scotland is the Canada of England! — Rainn Wilson

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow. — Samuel Johnson

There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers. — James Russell Lowell

I was as virtuously given as a gentleman need to be; virtuous enough; swore little; diced not above seven times a week; went to a bawdy-house once in a quarter - of an hour; paid money that I borrowed, three of four times; lived well and in good compass: and now I live out of all order, out of all compass. — William Shakespeare

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Learn to overrule minor interest in favor of great ones, and generously to do all the good the heart prompts; a man is never injured by acting virtuously. — Luc De Clapiers

Living virtuously is equal to living in accordance with one's experience of the actual course of nature — Chrysippus

It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first? — Pierre Bayle

Guide valiantly.
Guide venerably.
Guide valiantly.
Guide virtuously. — Matshona Dhliwayo

The American craving for illegal, mind-altering, addictive chemicals provides a steady flow of American capital through the Texas border into Mexico and South America. Basically, the drug traffic is uncontainable as long as its U.S. market exists, but newspapers and other media virtuously trumpet feel-good headlines about "record drug busts" and arrests while the drug trade continues unabated. — William Earl Maxwell

Sarah had no intention of having nannies or anything like that. Her mother had sighed a bit, and said vaguely: 'I always find women who look after their own children get rather untidy and disorganised. Husbands hate it too'. Sometimes Sarah wanted to slap her face. — Josa Young

Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity — Nadine Gordimer

Anyone can lead when the plan is working. The best lead when the plan falls apart. — Robin Sharma