I am not sure how much good is done by moralising about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle - telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favourable outcome. Fairy tales are not, on the whole, parables.
A. S. Byatt
I think the virtue I prize above all others is curiosity. If you look really hard at almost anybody, and try to see why they're doing what they're doing, taking a dig at them ceases to be what you want to do even if you hate them.
If there can be films about why hockey (and not just cricket) is cool, there can be a film or two about the virtues of honest, hard work.
Abhijit Banerjee
Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues.
Abigail Adams
Great necessities call out great virtues.
Solitude can be used well by very few people. They who do must have a knowledge of the world to see the foolishness of it, and enough virtue to despise all the vanity.
Abraham Cowley
It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln
The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side... It has revealed to us much about man's shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.
Abraham Maslow
I could enjoy the life that I had by virtue of the educational attainment that my grandparents and parents had pursued. Education was always incredibly valued in our family.
Adam Braun
By virtue of our private property society, we have disconnected individuals from the land. We have put them in high rises and asked them to live their lives in urban settings, disconnected from the land.
Adam Dell
There are as many attitudes to cooking as there are people cooking, of course, but I do think that cooking guys tend - I am a guilty party here - to take, or get, undue credit for domestic virtue, when in truth cooking is the most painless and, in its ways, ostentatious of the domestic chores.
Adam Gopnik
Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity.
Adam Grant
Authenticity is a virtue. But just as you can have too little authenticity, you can also have too much.
Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith
Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.
Often devotion to virtue arises from sated desire.
Adela Florence Nicolson
As an actor, technically, when you are off a film, you are out of a job. An actor goes from job to job. By virtue, acting is an unsure profession.
Aditya Roy Kapur
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
Adlai Stevenson I
The land of Beulah lies beyond the valley of the shadow of death. Many Christians spend all their days in a continual bustle, doing good. They are too busy to find either the valley or Beulah. Virtues they have, but are full of the life and attractions of nature, and unacquainted with the paths of mortification and death.
Adoniram Judson
By virtue of my job, I'm traveling. You get to spend very little time with your family. We hardly get to meet each other except on the one odd day we really get to spend time, have dinner together. And that's rare, and we cherish it.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
I want to present interesting stories that don't qualify themselves just by virtue of their ethnographic type.
I think my greatest virtue is that I have the courage to take tough decisions. As for my greatest fault, I guess I should be a little tougher. The feedback I get always is that I am not as tough and demanding as I should be.
When virtue and modesty enlighten her charms, the lustre of a beautiful woman is brighter than the stars of heaven, and the influence of her power it is in vain to resist.
Hear the words of prudence, give heed unto her counsels, and store them in thine heart; her maxims are universal, and all the virtues lean upon her; she is the guide and the mistress of human life.
Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.
What I can't completely understand is most other people's fascination with what the famous among us do with their lips and the rest of their bodies. Why do ordinary people become the target of this curiosity simply by virtue of the fact that other people recognise their names and faces but know almost nothing else about them?
I figured I would always be a candidate for man of the year in the virtue-is-its-own-reward category. What that did was force me to concentrate on the work.
Modesty is not one of my virtues.
Virtue cannot separate itself from reality without becoming a principle of evil.
As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all its virtues are of no avail.
In the absence of willpower the most complete collection of virtues and talents is wholly worthless.
My cinema is an extension of myself. A sort of life-testimony of my vital experience, with my few virtues and my numerous limitations.
We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.
Hollywood wants its heroes to be virtuous, but it defines virtue in a way that excludes any action that is self-interested. If virtue means putting others ahead of self, then it's clear that most people, let alone most capitalists, aren't very virtuous.
The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.
Know then this truth, enough for man to know virtue alone is happiness below.
Virtue she finds too painful an endeavour, content to dwell in decencies for ever.
In every age poets and social reformers have tried to stimulate the people of their own time to a nobler life by enchanting stories of the virtues of the heroes of old.
True courage is not the brutal force of vulgar heroes, but the firm resolve of virtue and reason.
Wisdom alone is true ambition's aim, wisdom is the source of virtue and of fame; obtained with labour, for mankind employed, and then, when most you share it, best enjoyed.
To say of shame - what is it? Of virtue - we can miss it; Of sin-we can kiss it, And it's no longer sin.
If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.
There may be a hundred thousand men in an army, who are all equally free; but they only are naturally most fit to be commanders or leaders, who most excel in the virtues required for the right performance of those offices.
For centuries, the question of men needing to comprehend women simply didn't arise. Men were valued according to how they measured up to the manly virtues.
Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.
Patience, n. A minor form of dispair, disguised as a virtue.
Perseverance - a lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.
Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.
Experience is knowledge; but knowledge, when it is sought only as a material resource, is not always a blessing. Experience is wisdom; but wisdom, with those who lack vision, is not always power. Experience is tolerance; but tolerance, when it is induced by apathy, is not in the least a virtue.