Intelligent Virtue Quotes

“We find the important similarity of virtue to skill in skills where two things are united: the need to learn and the drive to aspire.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“it is not a fun state that we struggle to achieve and then relax, as though we were working at an uncongenial job in order to retire and forget about the work we did to get there. Rather happiness, living happily, is always an ongoing activity. It is an ongoing project, and so very different to accounts in terns of feeling good or getting what you want or being satisfied. This is an account of happiness which emphasizes activity and engagement rather than passive experiences.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“Happiness is at least in part activity. If we fully take this on board, putting the feel-good accounts of happiness on one side, it becomes clearer why what makes us happy couldn't just be stuff sitting there in our lives, or passive states of feeling or satisfaction. To live happily we require something with as much dynamism and internal drive as happiness itself has, and the virtues provide this.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“A shop flyer I saw gets something right: `Money doesn't make you does.' Stuff is irrelevant for happiness until you do something with it, even shopping.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“A happy life is one you enjoy, one you find pleasant, want to continue with, find sustaining. An unhappy life is one in which you are miserable, one you avoid if you can, one in which there is little or no enjoyment. Happiness, in other words, seems to imply some connection with pleasure.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“We often make heroes or celebrities of people for their virtues (not just their actions) in one area of their lives. Later we discover feet of clay in other areas of their lives, and we are disproportionately disillusioned. A new biography revealing hitherto unknown faults in some public figure's private life affects our view of the person as whole for the worse.' If we admire people for their virtue on the basis merely of one area of their lives, we risk being prematurely satisfied in our heroes and role models, and this will frequently lead to later disappointment, not just with the particular person but with the whole project of becoming brave, generous, or whatever.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“Aristotle points out, generosity requires taking from the right sources as well as giving to the right people in the right way.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“virtuous people have their attention focused outwards on the action rather than inwards on themselves.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“Why would we expect much useful action guidance merely from recognizing that something is the right thing to do? The only thing useful for guidance that it does is to direct us towards the richer virtue concepts, whose content we do have some reasonably specific understanding of.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“The first ethical move is not to abstract from my individual context, still less to discount it, but rather to understand what it consists in, to achieve self-knowledge as far as I can, and then to think about how best to live my life in these circumstances.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“That is why it would be grotesque to have posters in elementary schools depicting Donald Trump as a hero for the young, rather than people like King, Gandhi, and Mandela.14”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“We always learn to be virtuous in a given context; there is no such thing as just learning to be generous or loyal in the abstract.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“As parents and teachers know well, we teach children to be fair and honest not by teaching them what they should do and then trying to interest them in having a new motivation to do this. Rather, we try to educate and fowl motivations that are present already.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“A virtue is a disposition which is central to the person, to whom he or she is, a way we standardly think of character.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“Virtue and flourishing are both central in it, but neither is a
basis or foundation from which other parts of the theory can be derived, nor do they jointly form such a foundation. Rather, the theory is holistic in structure; the different parts are mutually supportive.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“these ideas are far more intuitive and empirically rooted than often assumed. Working from the ground up helps to make this clear.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“Rather than asking at the start how virtues relate to rules, principles, maximizing, or a final end, we will gain by looking at the way in which the acquisition and exercise of virtue can be seen to be in many ways like the acquisition and exercise of more mundane activities, such as farming, building, or playing the piano.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue

“It seems worthwhile, then, to begin with virtue, rather than with a type of ethical theory, and to see what kind of account can be produced.”
― Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue