Quotes to inspire and reflect

If a superior man abandon virtue, how can he fulfil the requirements of that name?

The existence of virtue depends entirely upon its use.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

Abstract qualities begin / With capitals alway: / The True, the Good, the Beautiful—/Those are the things that pay!

Virtue is more clearly shown in the performance of fine actions than in the nonperformance of base ones.

Virtue is like precious odours,—most fragrant when they are incensed or crushed.

A state of temperance, sobriety and justice without devotion is a cold, lifeless, insipid condition of virtue, and is rather to be styled philosophy than religion.

Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

Wherever a people has grown savage in arms so that human laws have no longer any place among it, the only powerful means of reducing it is religion.

To-day violence is the rhetoric of the period.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

Now at last the slowly gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us. Four or five millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept.

God hates violence. He has ordained that all men / fairly possess their property, not seize it.

For lawless joys a bitter ending waits.

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of a whole city.

Jupiter has loaded us with a couple of wallets: the one, filled with our own vices, he has placed at our backs; the other, heavy with those of others, he has hung before.

This is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Vice often rides triumphant in virtue’s chariot.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time—or returning thither after long absence—and stepping into a Venetian gondola?

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when the^came in contact with the more civilized.

Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.

A vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

It is not vain-glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.

The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

Those things are dearest to us that have cost us most.

The value of a man can only be measured with regard to other men.

The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

That which cost little is less valued.

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

[T]he hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.

It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody; scarcely less to be of use to everybody.