#virtue

Riches, the dumb god that giv'st all men tongues, / That canst do nought, and yet mak'st men do all things; / The price of souls; even hell, with thee to boot, / Is made worth heaven! ↗

— Ben Jonson

#men

The plastic virtues: purity, unity, and truth, keep nature in subjection. ↗

— Guillaume Apollinaire

#nature #plastic #purity #subjection #truth

Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#good #happiness #man #own #secured

Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will. Virtue, good, evil are nothing but words, unless one takes them apart in order to build something with them; they do not win their true meaning until one knows how to apply them. ↗

— Paul Gauguin

#apply #build #evil #good #how

In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like. ↗

— Os Guinness

#freedom #humanity #positive-freedom #truth #virtue

What other nations call religious toleration, we call religious rights. They are not exercised in virtue of governmental indulgence, but as rights, of which government cannot deprive any portion of citizens, however small. ↗

— Richard Mentor Johnson

#call #cannot #citizens #deprive #exercised

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention. ↗

— Ninon de L'Enclos

#feminine #invention #masculine #nothing #virtue

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. ↗

— Herman Melville

#frontiers #passport #pays #sin #stopped

The ruthlessness of the godly invalidated their claims of virtue. ↗

— Salman Rushdie

#virtue #religion

Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body. ↗

— Baldassare Castiglione

#courtier #light #philosophy #religion #vice