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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Classical antiquity6 quotes
Between us and excellence, the gods have placed the sweat of our brows. — Hesiod · 700 BCVirtue 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. — Socrates · 399 BCFor he does not wish to appear the bravest, but to be the bravest. — Aeschylus · 467 BCNeither 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. — Aristotle · 322 BCMany evil men are rich, and good men poor,
But we shall not exchange with them our excellence for riches. — Solon · 560 BCThe renown which riches or beauty confer is fleeting and frail; mental excellence is a splendid and lasting possession. — Sallust · 42 BCThe Renaissance5 quotes
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. — John Milton · 1644Virtue shuns ease as a companion... It demands a rough and thorny path. — Michel de Montaigne · 1580Virtue is choked with foul ambition. — William Shakespeare · 1594Most men admire
Virtue who follow not her lore. — John Milton · 1671There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts. — William Shakespeare · 1598Age of Enlightenment1 quote
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. — Edmund Burke · 1770Colonial America1 quote
Search others for their Virtues, thyself for thy Vices. — Benjamin Franklin · 1738Middle Ages1 quote
Consider your origin;
you were not born to live like brutes,
but to follow virtue and knowledge. — Dante Alighieri · 1321