We live in the kind of world where courage is the most essential of virtues; without courage, the other virtues are useless.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
How beautiful then is modesty and what a gem among virtues it is.
To argue about justice is unavoidably to argue about virtues, about substantive moral and even spiritual questions.
Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.
I'm very much a Christian in ideals and ethics, especially in terms of belief in fairness, a deep set obligation to others, and the virtues of charity, tolerance and generosity that we associate with traditional Christian teaching.
Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight.
VIRTUES, n. pl. Certain abstentions.
We underestimate the value of patience. It is possible that people might sometimes interrupt our meditation sessions or Dharma study, but they can never take away our opportunity to train in inner virtues such as patience. It is this mental training, rather than outer virtuous activities, that is the essence of Dharma practice.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Gilbert Jonas, painter, believed in his star. . . . His own faith was not, however, without its virtues because it consisted in admitting, in some obscure way, that he would obtain many things without deserving them.
The low desire, the base design That makes another's virtues less.
The so-called Christian virtues of humility, love, charity, personal freedom, the strong prohibitions against violence, murder, stealing, lying, cruelty-all these are washed away by war. The greatest hero is the one who kills the most people. Glamorous exploits in successful lying and mass stealing and heroic vengeance are rewarded with decorations and public acclaim.
Though pride is not a virtue, it is the parent of many virtues.
Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, rather because it wishes to be art. However much the writer might long to be straightforward, these virtues are no longer available to him. He discovers that in being simple, honest, straightforward, nothing much happens.
I am no herald to inquire into men's pedigree; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues.
He that's ungrateful has no guilt but one; All other crimes may pass for virtues in him.
Humility is the sure evidence of Christian virtues. Without it, we retain all our faults still, and they are only covered over with pride, which hides them from other men's observation, and sometimes from our own too.
Idleness is the Dead Sea that swallows all virtues
When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.