Pastoral Resources

Let them call it mischief: When it is past and prospered t'will be virtue.

Wisdom is knowing what to do next; virtue is doing it.

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions.

Moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative.

Morality is a venereal disease. Its primary stage is called virtue; its secondary stage, boredom; its tertiary stage, syphilis.

If we insist that public life be reserved for those whose personal history is pristine, we are not going to get paragons of virtue running our affairs. We will get the very rich, who contract out the messy things in life the very dull, who have nothing to hide and nothing to show and the very devious, expert at covering their tracks and ambitious enough to risk their discovery.

This idea of selfishness as a virtue, as opposed to generosity: That, to me, is unnatural.

Conscience is the sentinel of virtue.

God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

Feminine virtue is nothing but a convenient masculine invention.

The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

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

Virtue by premeditation isn't worth much.

The sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.

I do not believe in sex distinction in literature, law, politics, or trade - or that modesty and virtue are more becoming to women than to men, but wish we had more of it everywhere.

Cheerfulness is a very great help in fostering the virtue of charity. Cheerfulness itself is a virtue.

Many a person has held close, throughout their entire lives, two friends that always remained strange to one another, because one of them attracted by virtue of similarity, the other by difference.

We cannot attribute to fortune or virtue that which is achieved without either.