Crime like virtue has its degrees; and timid innocence was never known to blossom suddenly into extreme license.
To a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less dangerous than their virtues.
What more valuable than Gold? Diamonds. Than Diamonds? Virtue.
You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Assume a virtue if you have it not.
Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher - for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.
If virtue cannot shine bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from her that she derives her reputation and honor?
Reward is its own virtue.
I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.
It is easy to be virtuous in prospective.
Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.
Tenderness is a virtue.
Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists not in saving but selection. Parsimony requires no providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no comparison, no judgment.
Even a pacifist should admire the military virtues.
Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history?
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
The highest virtue is not virtuous. Therefore it has virtue. The lowest virtue holds on to virtue. Therefore it has no virtue.
There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do.
What is virtue? reason put into practice: -talent? reason expressed with brilliance: -soul? reason delicately put forth; and genius is sublime reason.