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Virtue
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“No one's interested in virtue till it's been lost.”
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“Too much virtue has a corrupting effect.”
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“Virtue, like a dowerless beauty, has more admirers than followers.”
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“... there's a pitch of virtue about him that is exhausting.”
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“... there isn't any virtue where there has never been any temptation. Virtue is just temptation, overcome.”
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“I am not impressed by external devices for the preservation of virtue in men or women. Marriage laws, the police, armies and navies are the mark of human incompetence.”
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“... Mr. Bull revealed a streak of conscious virtue which his acquaintances somewhat naturally discredited instantly from his very insistence upon it.”
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“The Devil ... is much better served by exploiting our virtues than by appealing to our lower passions; consequently, it is when the Devil looks most noble and reasonable that he is most dangerous.”
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“If you seek what is honorable, what is good, what is the truth of your life, all the other things you could not imagine come as a matter of course.”
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“... it is a greater honour to have more Merit than Title, than to have more Title than Merit. ”
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“Reward is its own virtue.”
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“... I have brought him [my son] up to think that purity and virtue are both masculine and femanine gender, and that God's angels are not necessarily all she ones.”
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“One can acquire some virtues by feigning them for a long time.”
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“Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.”
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“It is queer how it is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.”
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“Virtue has its own reward but not at the box office.”
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“Some out of their own virtue make a god who sometimes later is a nuisance to them, a terror perhaps to them, a difficult thing to be forgetting.”
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“Honor wears different coats to different eyes ...”
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“Vices are simply overworked virtues ...”
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“I desire Virtue, though I love her not - / I have no faith in her when she is got: / I fear that she will bind and make me slave, / And send me songless to the sullen grave.”
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“I have come to believe that we fear our virtues far more than our sinfulness.”
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“You may have noted the fact that it is a person's virtues as often as his vices that make him difficult to live with.”
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“... there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.”
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“Nobody likes to be accused of a virtue.”
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“Virtue knows no color line ...”
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“The muses crown virtue when fortune refuses to do it.”
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“... the word 'virtue' is not / in my vocabulary / 'strength' is ...”
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“... a man hasn't got a corner on virtue just because his shoes are shined.”
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“... whether or not virtue was in fact its own reward, it did seem like sin was its own punishment.”
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“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.”
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“Purity strikes me as the most mysterious of the virtues and the more I think about it the less I know about it.”
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“Honor is a term much used but little understood.”
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“My virtue's still far too small, I don't trot it out and about yet.”
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“As a child I was early turned from the path of righteousness by the unfortunate remark once let drop in my presence by my mother that virtue is its own reward. Hitherto I had supposed that if I were being good it was for some decent and intelligible purpose.”
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“The man or the woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor the lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.”
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“We shall all be perfectly virtuous when there is no longer any flesh on our bones.”
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“One seldom loves people for their virtues.”
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“May I never, I say, become that abnormal, merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity — a virtuous woman.”
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“Live virtuously, my Lord, and you cannot die too soon, nor live too long.”
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“All forced virtue is degrading in it effect.”
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“Virtue is the music of the soul, the harmony of the passions; it is the order, the symmetry, the interior beauty of the mind; the source of the truest pleasures, the fountain of the sublimest and most perfect happiness.”
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“As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.”
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“Woman's virtue is man's greatest invention.”
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“... virtue can only flourish among equals ...”
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“Jennet was one of those persons, abounding in every class of life, whose virtues are most conspicuous in 'damning sins they are not inclined to.'”
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“Virtue can only flourish amongst equals.”
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“Virtue is an excellent thing and we should all strive after it, but it can sometimes be a little depressing.”