Quotes · Skopia

20 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Virtue✕clear

Speech · Political speech

There is no truth more thoroughly established, than that there exists in the economy and course of nature, an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy, and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity.

George Washington

First Inaugural Address of George Washington · 1789

★ 1.3

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

The Innocents Abroad · 1869

★ 1.4

Play · Comedy (play)

There is no vice so simple but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.

William Shakespeare

The Merchant of Venice · 1598

★ 1.9

Historical literature

The renown which riches or beauty confer is fleeting and frail; mental excellence is a splendid and lasting possession.

The War of Catiline · 42 BC

★ 2.0

Poem · Religious literature · Epic poem

Most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore.

Paradise Regained · 1671

★ 2.2

Search others for their Virtues, thyself for thy Vices.

Benjamin Franklin

1738

★ 2.2

Pamphlet · Political literature

We must soften into a credulity below the milkiness of infancy, to think all men virtuous. We must be tainted with a malignity truly diabolical, to believe all the world to be equally wicked and corrupt.

1770

★ 3.5

Play · History (play)

Virtue is choked with foul ambition.

William Shakespeare

Henry VI, Part 2 · 1594

★ 3.6

Many evil men are rich, and good men poor, But we shall not exchange with them our excellence for riches.

Plutarch, Plutarch's Lives · 560 BC

★ 3.7

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation.

1788

★ 3.7

Virtue shuns ease as a companion... It demands a rough and thorny path.

Michel de Montaigne

Essays · 1580

★ 3.8

Personal journal

Virtue is not always amiable.

1779

★ 3.8

I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.

Thomas Jefferson

1813

★ 3.8

Play · Greek tragedy · Tragedy (play)

For he does not wish to appear the bravest, but to be the bravest.

Seven Against Thebes · 467 BC

★ 3.9

Philosophical literature

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

The Nicomachean Ethics · 322 BC

★ 3.9

Courtroom speech · Speech · Philosophical literature

Virtue does not come from money, but from virtue comes money and all other good things to man, both to the individual and to the state.

Plato, Apology · 399 BC

★ 4.0

Political literature

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.

Areopagitica · 1644

★ 5.3

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Essays: First Series (Emerson) · 1841

★ 7.0

Poem · Didactic poem

Between us and excellence, the gods have placed the sweat of our brows.

Works and Days · 700 BC

★ 7.6

Poem · Narrative poem · Epic poem · Religious literature

Consider your origin; you were not born to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

Dante Alighieri

Inferno · 1321

★ 8.0