1,046 Quotes About Virtue

In the void is virtue, and no evil. Wisdom has existence, principle has existence, the Way has existence, spirit is nothingness.

If one believes that God is up there in heaven, separate from the world, and is preparing a reward for you in the next life, the belief can have the result of making people accept their fate, however hard and unjust, and be less willing to change it. But for us, who find illumination in the mortal world, the situation is this: Where poverty, oppression, or pollution has taken root, and made the world less fit for the flourishing of life, there we find work to do.

More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.

The river that washes all your sins is flowing inside you. Every time you go inward and take a dip into the river of nothingness, a new version of you emerges out of it.

That's your cruelty, that's what's mean and selfish about you. If you loved your brother, you'd give him a job he didn't deserve, precisely because he didn't deserve it--that would be true love and kindness and brotherhood. Else what's love for? If a man deserves a job, there's no virtue in giving it to him. Virtue is the giving of the undeserved.

There is a virtue, I must presume, in shamelessness, since by placing on parade the things one does not know, one discovers that no one else knows either.

Honor cultures probably rely too much on shame, but our modern alternative is an epidemic of shamelessness.

Courage is inseparable from love and leads to what may arguably be the noblest of all warrior virtues: selflessness.

The courage of the authoritarian character is essentially a courage to suffer what fate or its personal representative or “leader” may have destined him for. To suffer without complaining is his highest virtue—not the courage of trying to end suffering or at least to diminish it. Not to change fate, but to submit to it, is the heroism of the authoritarian character.