Virtuously Quotes

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. ~ Kenneth Clark

Just as little as a reader today reads all of the individual words (let alone syllables) on a page - rather he picks about five words at random out of twenty and "guesses" at the meaning that probably belongs to these five words - just as little do we see a tree exactly and completely with reference to leaves, twigs, color, and form; it is so very much easier for us to simply improvise some approximation of a tree. Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we will still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its "inventors." All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are - accustomed to lying. Or to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Living virtuously is equal to living in accordance with one's experience of the actual course of nature ~ Chrysippus

Babbit was an average father. He was affectionate, bullying, opinionated, ignorant, and rather wistful. Like most parents he enjoyed the game of waiting till the victim was clearly wrong, then virtuously pouncing. ~ Sinclair Lewis

Yet through virtuous living man is further ordained to a higher end, which consists in the enjoyment of God, as we have said above. Consequently, since society must have the same end as the individual man, it is not the ultimate end of an assembled multitude to live virtuously, but through virtuous living to attain to the possession of God. ~ Thomas Aquinas

You learn more about life and people in two hours of war than in four decades of peace. War is dirty, sure, war is senseless, but come on! Civilian life is also senseless, in its sameness and it's reasonableness and because it dulls the instincts. The truth that no one dares speak aloud is that war is a pleasure, The greatest pleasure there is, otherwise it would stop immediately. Once you've tasted it, it's like heroin: you want more. (...) The taste for war, real war, is as natural to man as taste for peace, it's idiotic to want to eliminate it by repeating virtuously that peace is good and war is evil. In fact it's like men and women, yin and yang: you need both. ~ Emmanuel Carrere

Now everybody separated that and said: there is either rushing virtuously to live a collective life or else there is this selfish introspection and concern with your own development. But the two are completely interdependent, they are completely interactive; and the more you have this response to life, the more you have a source to respond with, then of course the more enrichment you pass around you. Why we made a dichotomy between those two - saying that the two wouldn't enrich each other - I don't know. Because whatever the individual does for himself and by himself is something that ultimately flows back again like a river into the collective unconscious. So if we are disappointed today in the external changes it's because not enough of us have worked at raising a better quality of human being. ~ Anais Nin

Stoic ethics is a species of eudaimonism. Its central, organizing concern is about what we ought to do or be to live well - to flourish. That is, we make it a lemma that all people ought to pursue a good life for themselves as a categorical commitment second to none. It does not follow from this that they ought to pursue any one particular version of the good life, or to cling tenaciously to the one they are pursuing. …

Living virtuously is the process of creating a single, spatiotemporal object - a life. A life has a value as an object, as a whole. It is not always the case that its value as an object will be a function of the value of its spatiotemporal parts considered separately. But it is always the case that an evaluation of the parts will be incomplete until they are understood in the context of the whole life. What seems so clearly valuable (or required or excellent) when we focus on a thin temporal slice of a life (or a single, long strand of a life) may turn out to be awful or optional or vicious when we take a larger view. And it is the life as a whole that we consider when we think about its value in relation to other things, or its value as a part of the cosmos.

… In our view, a focus on the parts of a life, or on the sum of its parts, obscures some important features of ethical inquiry. One such feature is the extent to which an agent's own estimate of the value of his life is necessarily inconclusive: others will have to judge his life as ~ Lawrence C. Becker

Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues. ~ Alasdair MacIntyre

Let it be enough for you to have bread and live virtuously and poorly like Christ, as I do here. I live meanly and don't bother about life or honor ... and I live with the greatest toil and a thousand worries. It is now about 15 years since I had a happy hour. ~ Michelangelo

Patriotism is a virtue, no doubt: and it is a duty to cherish patriotism in ourselves and others. But patriotism means wishing well to our country, and the question is what is this "well". Lord Beaconsfield would say "material prosperity, grandeur, increase of power and territory"; Mr. Gladstone would say "that our country may act virtuously". If patriotism is an extension of the feeling which we have about our relatives, Mr. Gladstone is surely right; we wish our relatives to be good men in the first instance, and then successful men, if success is compatible with goodness. I cannot understand how many excellent people fail to feel thus about their country too; it would seem to me that exactly in the proportion in which we realise the fact that a nation is only a very overgrown family which has kept open house for some centuries will be our anxiety that this country should act as a good man would act; and that patriotism consists in wishing this. ~ Henry Parry Liddon

It has been asserted, that a moral Atheist would be a monster beyond the power of nature to create: I reply, that it is not more strange for an Atheist to live virtuously, than for a Christian to abandon himself to crime! If we believe the last kind of monster, why dispute the existence of the first? ~ Pierre Bayle

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after. ~ Iris Murdoch

Blindness to larger contexts is a constitutional defect of human thinking imposed by the painful necessity of being able to concentrate on only one thing at a time. We forget as we virtuously concentrate on that one thing that hundreds of other things are going on at the same time and on every side of us, things that are just as important as the object of our study and that are all interconnected in ways that we cannot even guess. Sad to say, our picture of the world to the degree to which it has that neatness, precision, and finality so coveted by scholarship is a false one.
I once studied with a famous professor who declared that he deliberately avoided the study of any literature east of Greece lest the new vision destroy the architectonic perfection of his own celebrated construction of the Greek mind. His picture of that mind was immensely impressive but, I strongly suspect, completely misleading. ~ Hugh Nibley

Once, complaining that his mother tried to do things that blind people should not attempt, like lighting candles at Christmas, he said, "My mother wants to have her blindness and eat it, too." I imagined Phil's mother spooning blindness into her own open mouth like devil's food cake. But without texture or weight. Bittersweet and rich. Another time he said, regarding his father's late support checks, that calling him in Texas wouldn't help, it would just make the checks even later. "It's a vicious circus," Phil said. When I asked if he thought that perhaps writing a letter, explaining their situation - the mortgage payment late again, the electric company calling - might help, he said, "I'm virtuously certain it wouldn't," looking martyred and older than his years. ~ Laura Kasischke

Learn to overrule minor interest in favor of great ones, and generously to do all the good the heart prompts; a man is never injured by acting virtuously. ~ Luc De Clapiers

Unlike Confucius, Madison maintained that people have a limited capacity to control their passions themselves and act virtuously when their individual interests conflict with others. ~ Patrick Mendis

Live simply and virtuously, true to your nature, drawing no line between what is spiritual and what is not. ~ Laozi

Once I no longer exist as I am, out of what consideration then should I forgo anything? Should I belong to a man I don't love simply because I used to love him? No, I forgo nothing, I love any man who appeals to me and I make any man who loves me happy. Is that ugly? No, it is at least far more beautiful than my cruelly delighting in the tortures incited by my charms and my virtuously turning my back on the poor man who pines away for me. I am young, rich, and beautiful, and just as I am, I live cheerfully for pleasure and enjoyment. ~ Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Guide valiantly.
Guide venerably.
Guide valiantly.
Guide virtuously. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

If they show themselves disposed to accept their proper position I will assist them to start virtuously in life by a present of one hundred pounds each. This sum I authorize you to pay them, on their personal application, with the necessary acknowledgment of receipt; and on the express understanding that the transaction, so completed, is to be the beginning and the end of my connection with them. The ~ Wilkie Collins

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow. ~ Samuel Johnson

I can't see why you should want to dance with me now, when you never have before." The statement was more revealing than she had intended it to be. She cursed her own wayward tongue, while his speculative gaze wandered over her face.

"I wanted to," he surprised her by murmuring. "However, there always seemed to be good reasons not to."

"Why--"

"Besides," Westcliff interrupted, reaching out to take her gloved hand, "there was hardly a point in asking when your refusal was a forgone conclusion." Deftly he pressed her hand to his arm and led her toward the mass of couples in the center of the room.

"It was not a forgone conclusion."

Westcliff glanced at her skeptically. "You're saying that you would have accepted me?"

"I might have."

"I doubt it."

"I did just now, didn't I?"

"You had to. It was a debt of honor."

She couldn't help but laugh. "For what, my lord?"

"The calf's head," he reminded her succinctly.

"Well, if you hadn't served such a nasty object in the first place, I wouldn't have needed to be rescued!"

"You wouldn't have need to be rescued if you didn't have such a weak stomach."

"You're not supposed to mention body parts in front of a lady," she said virtuously. "Your mother said so."

Westcliff grinned. "I stand corrected. ~ Lisa Kleypas