The Four Cardinal Virtues Quotes

“If in this supreme test, in face of which the braggart falls silent and every heroic gesture is paralyzed, a man walks straight up to the cause of his fear and is not deterred from doing that which is good -- which ultimately means for the sake of God, and therefore not from ambition or from fear of being taken for a coward -- this man, and he alone, is truly brave.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“To be just meaans to recognize the other as other; it means to give acknowledgment even where one cannot love... A just man is just, therefore, because he sanctions another person in his very separateness and helps him to receive his due.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“Human activity has two basic forms: doing (agere) and making (facere). Artifacts, technical and artistic, are the "works" of making. We ourselves are the "works" of doing.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“...Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“...the intemperately wrathful man is less obnoxious than the intemperately lustful one, while the immoderate pleasure-seeker, intent on dissimulation and camouflage, is unable to give or take a straight look in the eye.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“The brave man uses wrath for his own act, above all in attack, 'for it is peculiar to wrath to pounce upon evil. Thus fortitude and wrath work directly upon each other.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“Finally, it is no longer completely fantastic to think that a day may come when not the executioners alone will deny the inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“Perhaps when all the consequences of a false presupposition suddenly becomes a direct threat mean in their great terror will become aware that it is no longer possible to call back to true and effective life a truth they have allowed to become remote --- just for the sake of their bare survival.”
― Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues

“Just as kingly rule is the best, so is the rule of the tyrant the worst.”
― Richard Winston, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

“He is prudent who can listen in silence, who can take advice so as to gain a more precise, clear, and complete knowledge of the facts.”
― Richard Winston, The Four Cardinal Virtues: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge