Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Those who have virtue always in their mouths, and neglect it in practice, are like a harp, which emits a sound pleasing to others, while itself is insensible of the music.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

If virtue promises happiness, prosperity and peace, then progress in virtue is progress in each of these for to whatever point the perfection of anything brings us, progress is always an approach toward it.

The desire to annoy no one, to harm no one, can equally well be the sign of a just as of an anxious disposition.

The deferring of anger is the best antidote to anger.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.

I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.

In truth, politeness is artificial good humor, it covers the natural want of it, and ends by rendering habitual a substitute nearly equivalent to the real virtue.

One of the powerful temptations is that of the cinema palace. The cinema has undoubtedly an enormous attraction for boys, and people are constantly cudgelling their brains how to stop it. But it is one of those things which would be very difficult to stop even if it were altogether desirable.

The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.

One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving that issue.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Every fact is related on one side to sensation, and, on the other, to morals. The game of thought is, on the appearance of one of these two sides, to find the other: given the upper, to find the under side.

A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

It is a big temptation to me, when I create a character for a novel, to say that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day.

It is possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard.

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Every day we have plenty of opportunities to get angry, stressed or offended. But what you’re doing when you indulge these negative emotions is giving something outside yourself power over your happiness. You can choose to not let little things upset you.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

To be safe at the expense of the liberty of other people is a difficult equation.

We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

You don’t have to give way to careless speech or complaining. You don’t have to let your feelings get in the way of what God wants to do in your life.

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

The rulers of the state are the only persons who ought to have the privilege of lying, either at home or abroad; they may be allowed to lie for the good of the state.

I don’t think your ability to fight has anything to do with how big you are. It’s to do with how much anger is in you.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I think big business is a terrible thing for the spirit of the country, as our spirit is the best thing about us.

Of what use is a philosopher who doesn’t hurt anybody’s feelings?

Modesty is the color of virtue.

I’ve never been a manipulator, even in my bachelor days. I never wanted to do things to people that could catch up with me later on.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

Who ever is out of patience is out of possession of their soul.

Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?

One that confounds good and evil is an enemy to good.

Between stimulus and response, there is a space where we choose our response.

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

He who steals a little steals with the same wish as he who steals much, but with less power.

You can wipe out your opponents. But if you do it unjustly you become eligible for being wiped out yourself.

All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.

He who angers you conquers you.

I am not virtuous. Our sons will be if we shed enough blood to give them the right to be.

Those who forget good and evil and seek only to know the facts are more likely to achieve good than those who view the world through the distorting medium of their own desires.

In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so.

We’re all sinners. Everybody you meet all over the world is a sinner.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

The thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called ‚new morality‘ is all right. They say we’re living in a new generation; let’s be relevant, let’s change God’s law. Let’s say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication’s all right under certain circumstances. If it’s ‚meaningful.‘

All the commandments: You shall not commit adultery, you shall not kill, you shall not steal, you shall not covet, and so on, are summed up in this single command: You must love your neighbor as yourself.

I believe in the Golden Rule – The Man with the Gold… Rules.

Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.

People who truly understand what is meant by self-reliance know they must live their lives by ethics rather than rules.