Be studious in your profession, and you will be learned. Be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich. Be sober and temperate, and you will be healthy. Be in general virtuous, and you will be happy. At least, you will, by such conduct, stand the best chance for such consequences.
Benjamin Franklin
Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something.
Henry David Thoreau
I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain (what I consider the most enviable of all titles) the character of an "Honest Man."
George Washington
Let us endeavour so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
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
As diamonds cut diamonds, and one hone smooths a second, all the parts of intellect are whetstones to each other; and genius, which is but the result of their mutual sharpening, is character too.
Cyrus Bartol
Courage is rightly considered the foremost of the virtues, for upon it all others depend.
Sir Winston Churchill
The strongest, most generous and proudest of all virtues is courage.
Michel de Montaigne
Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.
Clare Luce
Misfortune does not always wait on vice; nor is success the constant guest of virtue.
William Havard
The universe does not favor the greedy, the dishonest, the vicious, although on the mere surface it may sometimes appear to do so; it helps the honest, the magnanimous, the virtuous. All the great Teachers of the ages have declared this in varying forms, and to prove and know it a man has but to persist in making himself more and more virtuous by lifting up his thoughts.
James Allen
This is the source.
Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do which must be done, whether you like it or not. Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance, self-control, diligence, strength of will, content, and a hundred other virtues which the idle never know.
Charles Kingsley
The shortest and surest way to live with honor in the world is to be in reality what we would appear to be; all human virtues increase and strengthen themselves by the practice and experience of them.
Socrates
The superior man seeks what is right; the inferior one, what is profitable.
Confucius
There are three marks of a superior man: being virtuous, he is free from anxiety; being wise, he is free from perplexity; being brave, he is free from fear.
Confucius
A virtue and a muscle are alike. If neither of them is exercised they get weak and flabby.
Richard Rooney
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
Clive Staples Lewis
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
If your morals make you dreary, depend on it, they are wrong.
Robert Louis Stevenson
You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn't reserve a plot for weeds.
Dag Hammarskjöld
Once we are self-aware, we must choose purposes and principles to live by; otherwise the vacuum will be filled, and we will lose our self-awareness and become like groveling animals who live primarily for survival and propagation. People who exist on that level aren't living; they are "being lived." They are reacting, unaware of the unique endowments that lie dormant and undeveloped within.
Stephen Covey
This is the source.
In my experience, any virtue translated into action leads almost invariably to positive results.
Brian Tracy
When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.
Thomas Paine
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