After Virtue Quotes

#1. I can only answer the question "What am I to do?" if I can answer the prior question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Wesley Hill

#2. The good which every man, who follows after virtue, desires for himself he will also desire for other men ...

Baruch Spinoza

#3. I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.

Charles Lamb

#4. Sincerely to aspire after virtue, is to gain her; and zealously to labour after her wages, is to receive them.

Charles Caleb Colton

#5. The thirst after fame is greater than that after virtue; for who embraces virtue if you take away its rewards?

Juvenal

#6. Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.

John Kenneth Galbraith

#7. We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it "refinements in domestic consumption." I call it meaningless waste.

Haruki Murakami

#8. Virtue that wavers is not virtue, but vice revolted from itself, and after a while returning. The actions of just and pious men do not darken in their middle course.

John Milton

#9. Republics, one after another ... have perished from a want of intelligence and virtue in the masses of the people ...

Horace Mann

#10. Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.

Barbara Pym

#11. The failure to cultivate virtue, the failure to examine and analyze what I have learned, the inability to move toward righteousness after being shown the way, the inability to correct my faults-these are the causes of my grief.

Confucius

#12. In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.

Benjamin Graham

#13. [Jesus] said "Follow me" and ended up with a lot of losers. And these losers ended up, through no virtue or talent of their own, becoming saints. Jesus wasn't after the best but the worst.

Eugene H. Peterson

#14. Injustice and filth they throw after the lonely one: but, my brother, if you would be a star, you must not shine less for them because of that. And beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves - they hate the lonely one.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#15. Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors.

Plato

#16. You can't have virtue without sin. What I'm after is having my characters' virtues defined by how they operate in a very sinful environment. That's how you test people.

Frank Miller

#17. And was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of the Englishman.

R. H. Tawney

#18. So the merman cannot belong to Agnes unless, after having made the infinite movement, the movement of repentance, he makes still one more movement by virtue of the absurd.

Soren Kierkegaard

#19. I could only get on at all by taking "nature" into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue.

Henry James

#20. Riches are first to be sought for; after wealth, virtue.

Horace

#21. The virtue of hope is an orientation of the soul towards a transformation after which it will be wholly and exclusively love.

Simone Weil

#22. Stalky,' in their school vocabulary, meant clever, well-considered and wily, as applied to plans of action; and 'stalkiness' was the one virtue Corkran toiled after.

Rudyard Kipling

#23. Get money first; virtue comes after.

Horace

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

Voltaire

#25. I never saw love as luck, as that gift from the gods which put everything else in place, and allowed you to succeed. No, I saw love as reward. One could find it only after one's virtue, or one's courage, or self-sacrifice, or generosity, or loss, has succeeded in stirring the power of creation.

Norman Mailer

#26. The whole mystery of temptation is to have sins suggested to us, and to be swept after them by a sudden enthusiasm, which sometimes feels as strong as the Spirit of God ever made in us the enthusiasm for virtue.

George A. Smith

#27. Money is to be sought for first of all; virtue after wealth.
[Lat., Quaerenda pecunia primum est; virtus post nummos.]

Horace

#28. I travel the broad path as is the way of youth, I give myself to vice unmindful of virtue, I am eager for the pleasure of the flesh more than salvation, my soul is dead and I shall look after the flesh.

Carl Orff

#29. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#30. What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue?

Richard Dawkins

#31. My custom is to read four or five chapters of the Bible every morning immediately after rising. It seems to me the most suitable manner of beginning the day. It is an invaluable and inexhaustible mine of knowledge and virtue.

John Quincy Adams

#32. Loving your homeland is just as natural as loving your father or mother - after all, your country nourishes you, protects you, and in many ways makes you who you are. Just as it's a virtue to honor your parents, it's a good and admirable thing to honor the land you call home.

William Bennett

#33. People generally report higher levels of stress, depression, and tension after watching TV. It seems that TV's main virtue is that it occupies the mind undemandingly.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#34. Happiness," wrote Yeats, "is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing." Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn't goal attainment but the process of striving after goals-that is, growth-that brings happiness.

Gretchen Rubin

#35. By virtue of this science the poet is the Namer, or Language-maker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another's, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment or boundary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#36. Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

C.S. Lewis

#37. After ages of bombast, the rhetoric of virtue has become ironic and shy.

Mason Cooley

#38. You smile with pomp and rigor, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue and get murdered time after time.

William Blake

#39. 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.

John Adams

#40. After my modest victory I played patience (the card game, not the virtue, never that) in the lounge, something I had not done since my ill-starred Tintagel honeymoon with Madame X.

David Mitchell

#41. In the ordinary course of things, how many succeed in society merely by virtue of their manners, while others, however meritorious, fail through lack of them? After all, it's only barbarians who wear uncut precious stones.

Lord Chesterfield

#42. A man may be accomplished in art, literature, and science, and yet, in honesty, virtue, truthfulness, and the spirit of duty, be entitled to take rank after many a poor and illiterate peasant.

Samuel Smiles

#43. One cannot conclude that there are no great saints just because no great miracles are worked. The true estimate of life, after all, lies in acts of virtue, not in the display of miracles. There are many, Peter, who without performing miracles, are not at all inferior to those who perform them.

Benet Tvedten

#44. I'm not denying their kindness," said the Rani. "But after all kindness isn't the only virtue.

Aldous Huxley

#45. If God permits virtue to be persecuted on earth, it is not for us to question his intentions. It may be that his rewards are held over for another life, for is it not true as written in Holy Scripture that the Lord chastenenth only the righteous! And after all, is not virtue it's own reward?

Marquis De Sade

#46. after all, hospitality was a virtue, one of the highest in Mamma's esteem.

Kristen Heitzmann