#virtues

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper. ↗

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

#defying #great #great virtues #his #keeping

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health. ↗

— Charles Caleb Colton

#bad #catch #company #contagious #disease

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don't let the facts get in the way of your imagination. ↗

— Sam Levenson

#facts #get #imagination #very #virtues

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#catch #far #liable #more #our

SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face sparked off for Dalgliesh a childhood memory. A multi-millionaire, in an age when a million meant something, had been brought to dinner at the rectory by a local landowner who was one of his father's churchwardens. He too had been a big man, affable an easy guest. The fourteen-year-old Adam [Dalgliesh] had been disconcerted to discover during the dinner conversation that he was rather stupid. He had then learned that the ability to make a great deal of money in a particular way is a talent highly advantageous to it possessor and possibly beneficial to others, but implies no virtue, wisdom or intelligence beyond expertise in a lucrative field. ↗

— P.D James

#wealth-and-virtues #age

Though I obviously have no proof of this, the one aspect of life that seems clear to me is that good people do whatever they believe is the right thing to do. Being virtuous is hard, not easy. The idea of doing good things simply because you're good seems like a zero-sum game; I'm not even sure those actions would still qualify as 'good,' since they'd merely be a function of normal behavior. Regardless of what kind of god you believe in--a loving god, a vengeful god, a capricious god, a snooty beret-wearing French god, or whatever--one has to assume that you can't be penalized for doing the things you believe to be truly righteous and just. Certainly, this creates some pretty glaring problems: Hitler may have thought he was serving God. Stalin may have thought he was serving God (or something vaguely similar). I'm certain Osama bin Laden was positive he was serving God. It's not hard to fathom that all of those maniacs were certain that what they were doing was right. Meanwhile, I constantly do things that I know are wrong; they're not on the same scale as incinerating Jews or blowing up skyscrapers, but my motivations might be worse. I have looked directly into the eyes of a woman I loved and told her lies for no reason, except that those lies would allow me to continue having sex with another woman I cared about less. This act did not kill 20 million Russian peasants, but it might be more 'diabolical' in a literal sense. If I died and found out I was going to hell and Stalin was in heaven, I would note the irony, but I couldn't complain. I don't make the fucking rules. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#good #hell #virtues #life

Virtues are acquired through endeavor, which rests wholly upon yourself. ↗

— Sidney Lanier

#acquired #endeavor #rests #through #upon

In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old. ↗

— Alfred Marshall

#enchanting #every #heroes #life #nobler

We need a type of patriotism that recognizes the virtues of those who are opposed to us. ↗

— Francis John McConnell

#opposed #patriotism #recognizes #those #type

There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders or leaders, who most excel in the virtues required for the right performance of those offices. ↗

— Algernon Sidney

#commanders #equally #excel #fit #free