We ought to esteem it of the greatest importance that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner to the promotion of virtue.Plato
Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous and you will be happy.Benjamin Franklin
Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.Marcus Aurelius
Men cannot improve a society by setting fire to it: they must seek out its old virtues, and bring them back into the light.Russell Kirk
No age, sex, or condition is above or below the absolute necessity of modesty; but without it one is vastly beneath the rank of man.Bernard Barton
Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair.Ira Gershwin
The love of power, like the love of money, increases with the possession of it; and we know in what ruin these baneful passions have involved human societies in all ages when they have been let loose and suffered to rage uncontrolled - There is no restraint like the pervading eye of the virtuous citizens.Samuel Adams
There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as 'caring' and 'sensitive' because he wants to expand the government's charitable programs is merely saying that he's willing to try to do good with other people's money.P. J. O'Rourke
Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.Abigail Adams
Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience.Ludwig van Beethoven
It may be very difficult to keep the virtues of purity, passion, and sacrifice of love in real life.Lee Min-ho
Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.Benjamin Disraeli
Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.Thomas Jefferson
If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.Epictetus
We speak of virtue, honour, reason; but our thought does not translate any one of these concepts into a substance.Wilhelm Wundt
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.Thomas Paine
Sometimes, idealistic people are put off the whole business of networking as something tainted by flattery and the pursuit of selfish advantage. But virtue in obscurity is rewarded only in Heaven. To succeed in this world you have to be known to people.Sonia Sotomayor
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.Harriet Beecher Stowe
A healthy social life is found only when, in the mirror of each soul, the whole community finds its reflection, and when, in the whole community, the virtue of each one is living.Rudolf Steiner
There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.Thomas Jefferson
A ruler makes use of the majority and neglects the minority, and so he does not devote himself to virtue but to law.Han Fei