"When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better. "
— Mae West

"Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently."
— Maya Angelou

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. "
— Winston S. Churchill

"One should always be drunk. That's all that matters...But with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you chose. But get drunk."
— Charles Baudelaire

"The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues."
— Elizabeth Taylor

"I beg you...to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer..."
— Rainer Maria Rilke

"Who can find a virtuous woman?
For her price is far above rubies."
— Proverbs 31.10

"You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise...guided by your own virtue and highest ambition"
— Philippa Gregory

"In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot."
— Czesław Miłosz

"I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints."
— Billy Joel

"But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is, cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths."
— Edmund Burke

"He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles."
— C.S. Lewis

"Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
"
— George Washington

"It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen."
— Aristotle (Etica Nicomaquea & Politica)

"I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people's time."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Memories of My Melancholy Whores)

"The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life."
— Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams)

"We often do good in order that we may do evil with impunity."
— Duc de La Rochefoucauld

"Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence."
— Ayn Rand (The Journals of Ayn Rand)

"We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We must remember that the test of our religious principles lies not just in what we say, not only in our prayers, not even in living blameless lives - but in what we do for others"
— Harry S. Truman

"It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge."
— Voltaire

"...happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement...."
— Aristotle

"Good and great are seldom in the same man. "
— Winston S. Churchill

"Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute."
— Thornton Wilder

"Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence, initiative and personal love for his work determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. Independence is the only gauge of human virtue and value. What a man is and makes of himself; not what he has or hasn't done for others. There is no substitute for personal dignity. There is no standard of personal dignity except independence."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"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 (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)

"To be proud of virtue, is to poison yourself with the Antidote."
— Benjamin Franklin

"They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the wicked, nor for guys like Billy, who were uncommitted regarding the whole idea of virtue versus wickedness and who were just trying to do their jobs."
— Dean Koontz (Dark Rivers of the Heart)

"As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky."
— Gustave Flaubert

"Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way... you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions."
— Aristotle

"Modesty is the citadel of beauty and virtue."
— Demades

"’Tis not in mortals to command success,/ But we’ll do more, Sempronius; we’ll deserve it."
— Joseph Addison

"The good die young - because they see it's no use living if you've got to be good. "
— John Barrymore

"Although the many virtues that courtesans possessed were employed to defy circumstances, the role they played depended on the same circumstances over which they triumphed- conditions which to, fortunately for modern women, no longer exist."
— Susan Griffin

"A good action is never lost; it is a treasure laid up and guarded for the doer’s need. "
— Pedro Calderón de la Barca

"[J]ene Entsagungen, die die Menschen alberner Weise Tugenden nennen [...]"
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"[D]as man die wahre Natur der Sinne nie verstanden hatte und dass sie wild und tierisch geblieben waren, nur weil die Welt versucht hatte, sie durch Aushungern zu bändigen und durch schmerzhaften Verzicht abzutöten, statt danach zu trachten, sie zu Elementen einer neuen Geistigkeit zu verwandeln, deren bezeichnendes Merkmal ein empfindsamer Sinn für die Schönheit sein sollte."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)

"[On the virtuous man] "He combines the highest, lowest and middle chords in complete harmony within himself.""
— Plato

"Lieber Armut mit Anstand als Reichtum mit Gemeinheit. Lieber sterben in Ehre als Leben in Schande."
— Dscheng-Hüan

"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 (Volpone; Or, the Fox)

"Mischiefs feed / Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed."
— Ben Jonson (Volpone; Or, the Fox)

"Nichts Interessantes ist jemals richtig."
— Oscar Wilde (Lord Arthur Savile's Crime)

"The Civilized… murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure."
— Charles Fourier

"All that evil requires is an absence of virtue, where somebody didn't make a stand."
— Terry Darlington

"Each man must grant himself the emotions that he needs and the morality that suits him. "
— Remy de Gourmont