Top 100 John Virtue Quotes
#1. All you have really to do is to keep your back as straight as you can; and not think about what is upon it. The real and essential meaning of "virtue" is that straightness of back.
John Ruskin
#2. God sure esteems the growth and completing of one virtuous person, more that the restraint of ten vicious.
John Milton
#3. Virtue, the strength and beauty of the soul, Is the best gift of Heaven: a happiness That even above the smiles and frowns of fate Exalts great Nature's favourites: a wealth That ne'er encumbers, nor can be transferr'd.
John Armstrong
#4. A man may cry out against sin in principle; but he cannot abhor it except by virtue of a godly aversion against it. I have heard many cry out against sin in the pulpit, but who still live with it without any problem in their heart, house, and everyday life.
John Bunyan
#5. 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
#6. To the extent to which a man is rational, life is the premise directing his actions. To the extent to which he is irrational, the premise directing his actions is death.
Ayn Rand
#7. If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.
John Ruskin
#8. Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.
John Adams
#10. I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.
John Milton
#11. The true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional neccessity, and in all cases a temporary one.
John Stuart Mill
#12. Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
John Ruskin
#13. Let grace and goodness be the principal loadstone of thy affections. For love which hath ends, will have an end; whereas that which is founded on true virtue, will always continue.
John Dryden
#14. A man is free in proportion to the measure of his virtues, and the extent to which he is free determines what his virtues can accomplish.
John Of Salisbury
#15. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the chameleon poet.
John Keats
#16. Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring - an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.
John Updike
#17. Always stand on principle ... even if you stand alone.
John Adams
#18. True humility is a kind of self-annihilation; and this is the centre of all virtues.
John Wesley
#19. When public virtue is gone, when the national spirit is fled the republic is lost in essence, though it may still exist in form
John Adams
#20. If at great things thou would'st arrive, Get riches first, get wealth, and treasure heap, Not difficult, if thou hearken to me; Riches are mine, fortune is in my hand, They whom I favor thrive in wealth amain, While virtue, valor, wisdom, sit in want.
John Milton
#21. True virtue, wheresoever it moves, still carries an intrinsic worth about it.
John Vanbrugh
#22. How much education may reconcile young people to pain and sufference, the examples of Sparta do sufficiently shew; and they who have once brought themselves not to think bodily pain the greatest of evils, or that which they ought to stand most in fear of, have made no small advance toward virtue.
John Locke
#23. Popularity, next to virtue and wisdom, ought to be aimed at; for it is the dictate of wisdom, and is necessary to the practice of virtue inmost.
John Adams
#24. Shall ignorance of good and ill Dare to direct the eternal will? Seek virtue, and of that possest, To Providence resign the rest.
John Gay
#25. Stirner and Nietzsche ... reveal how prone morality is to being used as a means of rationalization, a cloak for concealing violent and brutish passions, and making their sadistic expression a virtue.
John Carroll
#26. It is an observation of one of the profoundest inquirers into human affairs that a revolution of government is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.
John Adams
#27. Virtue is venerable as nothing else in this world is.
John Steinbeck
#28. Decision has greater virtue and force if taken after there has been eloquent dissent.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#29. The problem is hedonism. The problem is the preening vanity and selfishness of 'coming out,' of parading private inclinations, of a kind that repel normal people, as if those inclinations were, all by themselves, marks of authenticity and virtue, of suffering and oppression.
John Derbyshire
#30. I am determined to control events, not be controlled by them.
John Adams
#31. The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete sceptics in religion.
John Stuart Mill
#32. And what is faith, love, virtue unassay'd alone, without exterior help sustained?
John Milton
#33. The conquer'd, also, and enslaved by war, Shall, with their freedom lost, all virtue lose.
John Milton
#35. Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved.
Saint John Chrysostom
#36. Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification.
Ayn Rand
#37. The virtue of obedience makes the will supple ... It inspires the courage with which to fulfill the most difficult tasks.
John Vianney
#38. Love Virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or, if Virtue feeble were, Heav'n itself would stoop to her.
John Milton
#40. For neither do the spirits damned
Lose all their virtue, lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnished o'er with zeal.
John Milton
#41. It is not virtue, wisdom, valour, wit,
Strength, comeliness of shape, or amplest merit,
That woman's love can win, or long inherit;
But what it is, hard is to say,
Harder to hit.
John Milton
#42. Who thinks all Science, as all Virtue, vain; Who counts Geometry and numbers Toys ...
John Dryden
#43. Virtue and sense are one; and, trust me, still A faithless heart betrays the head unsound.
John Armstrong
#44. New solutions win by virtue of adoption, and they don't get adopted if they're bad solutions.
John Perry Barlow
#45. Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies...It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
Ayn Rand
#46. Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.
John Steinbeck
#48. To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.
John Lancaster Spalding
#49. Virtue is harder to be got than knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.
John Locke
#50. There are faults which show heart and win hearts, while the virtue in which there is no love, repels.
John Lancaster Spalding
#51. Your genuine happiness does not come from other people, activities or things, it comes from living a meaningful life - a life that is in alignment with your values and is beneficial.
John Bruna
#52. If it were given to a man to see virtue's reward in the next world, he would occupy his intellect, memory and will in nothing but good works, careless of danger or fatigue.
John Of The Cross
#53. The virtue of the civil partnerships scheme lay in the attempt to treat the needs of gay and lesbian couples as what they are, not to bundle them into some other category.
John Sentamu
#54. Courage is the enforcing virtue, the one that makes possible all the other virtues common
to exceptional leaders: honesty, integrity, confidence, compassion and humility
John McCain
#55. The great creative individual ... is capable of more wisdom and virtue than collective man ever can be.
John Stuart Mill
#56. A process of reason is a process of constant choice in answer to the question: True or False? - Right or Wrong?
Ayn Rand
#57. 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
#58. Who knows his virtues name or place, hath none.
John Donne
#59. Religion and virtue are the only foundations, not of republicanism and of all free government, but of social felicity under all government and in all the combinations of human society.
John Adams
#60. All the perplexities, confusion and distress in America arise, not from defects in their Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from the downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit and circulation.
John Adams
#61. Our genuine happiness comes from doing things we feel good about, not from doing things that make us feel good.
John Bruna
#62. No other virtue makes man more equal to the angels, than the imitation of their way of life.
John Cassian
#63. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments.
Ayn Rand
#64. I cannot think it either Vanity or Virtue to acknowledge, that the Acquisition and communication of Knowledge, are the sole Entertainment of my Life
John Adams
#65. 'Tis virtue, and not birth that makes us noble: Great actions speak great minds, and such should govern.
John Fletcher
#67. In his middle life, at about the time such things were known about, it was discovered that, he had pernicious anemia. It is possible that his virtue lived on a lack of energy.
John Steinbeck
#68. For Aristotle, it's not enough simply to act in accordance with the reason once in a while. We must cultivate habits of virtue that develop into a firmly established moral character over a lifetime.
John Mark Reynolds
#70. I say women exhibit the most exalted virtue when they depart from the domestic circle and enter on the concerns of their country, of humanity, and of their G-d!
John Quincy Adams
#71. The offspring of virtue is perseverance. The fruit and offspring of perseverance is habit and child of habit is character.
St. John Climacuslimacus
#72. Reality is that which exists; the unreal does not exist; the unreal is merely that negation of existence which is the content of a human consciousness when it attempts to abandon reason. Truth is the recognition of reality; reason, man's only means of knowledge, is his only standard of truth.
Ayn Rand
#74. Nothing is higher than heaven; nothing is beyond the walls of the world; nothing is lower than hell, or more glorious than virtue.48
John D. Barrow
#75. He thought of the virtues of courage and forbearance, which become flabby when there is nothing to use them on.
John Steinbeck
#76. Virtue may be assailed, but never hurt, Surprised by unjust force, but not enthralled.
John Milton
#77. We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.
John Steinbeck
#78. It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
#79. Strict punctuality is perhaps the cheapest virtue which can give force to an otherwise utterly insignificant character.
John Frederick Boyes
#80. Mortals that would follow me,
Love virtue, she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to climb
Higher than the sphery chime;
Or if virtue feeble were,
Heaven itself would stoop to her.
John Milton
#81. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?
John Quincy Adams
#82. I have long served virtue, And never ta'en wages of her.
John Webster
#83. Piety and virtue are not only delightful for the present, but they leave peace and contentment behind them.
John Tillotson
#85. It would not be easy even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life.
John Stuart Mill
#86. People who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.
John Hancock
#87. I forsee a marked deterioration in American musicand a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue - or rather by vice - of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines
John Philip Sousa
#88. Since life requires a specific course of action, any other course will destroy it. A being who does not hold his own life as the motive and goal of his actions, is acting on the motive and standard of death.
Ayn Rand
#89. For the world was changing, and sweetness was gone, and virtue too. Worry had crept on a corroding world, and what was lost- good manners, ease and beauty? Ladies were not ladies anymore, and you couldn't trust a gentleman's word.
John Steinbeck
#90. Wherefore did he [God] create passions within us, pleasures round about us, but that these rightly tempered are the very ingredients of virtue?
John Milton
#91. If there could be . . . a cause determining a person to benevolence towards the whole world of mankind . . . exclusive of . . . love to God, . . . it cannot be of the nature of true virtue."42
John Piper
#92. Life without thankfulness is devoid of love and passion. Hope without thankfulness is lacking in fine perception. Faith without thankfulness lacks strength and fortitude. Every virtue divorced from thankfulness is maimed and limps along the spiritual road.
John Henry Jowett
#93. Men's virtues I have commended as freely as I have taxed their crimes.
John Dryden
#94. However tiresome to others, the most indefatigable orator is never tedious to himself. The sound of his own voice never loses its harmony to his own ear; and among the delusions, which self-love is ever assiduous in attempting to pass upon virtue, he fancies himself to be sounding the sweetest tones
John Quincy Adams
#95. Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics.
John Adams
#97. Repentance is the virtue of weak minds.
John Dryden
#98. [I]t is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand. The only foundation of a free constitution is pure virtue.
John Adams
#99. People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#100. Modesty is a virtue that can never thrive in public.
John Adams
