#virtue

If you can be well without health, you may be happy without virtue. ↗

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#cannot #choose #literature #lose #made

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world. ↗

— Miguel de Cervantes

#among #every #found #greatest #himself

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it. ↗

— Epictetus

#anything #approach #brings #each #happiness

...when he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true Beauty). The love of the gods belongs to anyone who has given to true virtue and nourished it, and if any human being could become immortal, it would be he. ↗

— Plato

#love #philosophy #truth #virtue #beauty

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them. ↗

— Voltaire

#before #destroying #laws #shade #slight

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue. ↗

— Voltaire

#human #human mind #imagined #mind #superstitions

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. ↗

— Voltaire

#after #consider #energy #loss #most

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice. ↗