Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. — Aristotle
As the excellence of steel is strength, and the excellence of art is beauty, so the excellence of mankind is moral character. — Aiden Wilson Tozer
Virtue is a kind of health, beauty and good habit of the soul. — Plato
Good moral character is the first essential in a man. — George Washington
The best companion and helper is admirable morals. — Ali ibn Abi Talib
Physical excellence does not of itself produce a good mind and character: on the other hand, excellence of mind and character will make the best of the physique it is given. — Plato
High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments. — Christopher Hitchens
We assume therefore that moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite. — Aristotle
Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. — Aristotle
This is moral perfection: to live each day as though it were the last; to be tranquil, sincere, yet not indifferent to one's fate. — Marcus Aurelius
The most important attribute of man as a moral being is the faculty of self-control. — Herbert Spencer
Thought breeds thought; children familiar with great thoughts take as naturally to thinking for themselves as the well-nourished body takes to growing; and we must bear in mind that growth, physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, is the sole end of education. — Charlotte Mason
There is no god and there is no soul. Hence, there is no need for the props of traditional religion. With dogma and creed excluded, then immutable truth is dead and buried. There is no room for fixed and natural law or permanent moral absolutes. — John Dewey
Maturity is learning to walk away from people and situation that threaten your peace of mind, self respect, values, morals and self worth.
His lack of education is more than compensated for by his keenly developed moral bankruptcy. — Woody Allen
We must have moral education in the schools, anti-bullying programs, but this does not mean programs to feminize boys. — Christina Hoff Sommers
Universal education is not only a moral imperative but an economic necessity, to pave the way toward making many more nations self-sufficient and self-sustaining. — Desmond Tutu
We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Whoever wants to be a leader should educate himself before educating others. Before preaching to others he should first practice himself. Whoever educates himself and improves his own morals is superior to the man who tries to teach and train others. — Ali ibn Abi Talib
The object of basic education is the physical, intellectual and moral development of children through the medium of handicraft. — Mahatma Gandhi
It is a mistake to try to impose Christian beliefs on children and to make them the basis of moral training. The moral education of children is much too important a matter to be built on such foundations. — Margaret E. Knight
It is our moral obligation to give every child the very best education possible. — Desmond Tutu
Moral Virtues Quotes
History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster. — Douglas MacArthur
The only foundation for . . . a republic is to be laid in Religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. — Benjamin Rush
It is certainly true that a popular government cannot flourish without virtue in the people. — Richard Henry Lee
Without Virtue there can be no liberty — Benjamin Rush
The propitious smiles of Heaven, can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right, which Heaven itself has ordained... — George Washington
Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites. — Edmund Burke
Allow yourself to be a beginner. No one starts off being excellent.
Tolerance, a term which we sometimes use in place of the words respect, mercy, generosity, or forbearance, is the most essential element of moral systems; it is a very important source of spiritual discipline and a celestial virtue of perfected people. — Fethullah Gulen
When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder. — Lao Tzu
Moral courage is higher and a rarer virtue than physical courage. — William Slim
The best way to overcome the world is not with morality or self-discipline. Christians overcome the world by seeing the beauty and excellence of Christ. They overcome the world by seeing something more attractive than the world: Christ — Thomas Chalmers
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. — Aristotle
There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence. — Philip James Bailey
Old age is an excellent time for outrage. — Maggie Kuhn
It takes time to create excellence. If it could be done quickly, more people would do it.
Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning and enrichment, emotion and cognition. — Paul Kurtz
Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself! — Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
The virtues [moral excellence] therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit. — Aristotle
Keep feeling the need for being first. But I want you to be the first in love. I want you to be the first in moral excellence. I want you to be the first in generosity. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
One fact stands out in bold relief in the history of man's attempts for betterment. That is that when compulsion is used, only resentment is aroused, and the end is not gained. Only through moral suasion and appeal to man's reason can a movement succeed. — Samuel Gompers
In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness. — Tacitus
Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions. — Harriet Martineau
It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art. — Margaret Oliphant
I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts. — William Benton Clulow
We cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress. — Charles Sumner
Excellence-moral, ethical, personal excellence-is worth whatever it costs. — Charles R. Swindoll
Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. ...God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth. — William Ellery Channing
If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character. — Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt
One of my problems with terrorism is that it's self-evidently bad. The main thing that makes it complicated is the fact that it works. When you go at it with a moral hammer, it's really, really bad. It's so bad you wouldn't believe it because you don't accomplish anything. I think the one thing terrorists themselves are vulnerable to is mockery. It's an excellent weapon. — Lionel Shriver
Something extraordinary is happening. Do you sense it? Truly, as obedience and morality decline in the world, the Lord is sending more exceptional spirits to earth. As a body they excel the average capacity of their forebears. Their potential for personal growth and positive contribution is enormous. — Richard G. Scott
People do not naturally become morally excellent or practically wise. They become so, if at all, only as the result of lifelong personal and community effort. — Aristotle
No mistake is more to be deplored than the conception that a system of morals and religion should derive any portion of its authority either from the circumstance of its novelty or its antiquity, that it should be judged excellent, not because it is reasonable or true, but because no person has ever thought of it before, or because it has been thought of from the beginning of time. — Percy Bysshe Shelley
The form of government which you admire, when its principles are pure is admirable indeed. It is productive of every Thing which is great and excellent among men. But its principles are as easily destroyed as human nature is corrupted. Such a government is only to be supported by pure religion or Austere morals. — John Adams
Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness. — John Adams
God, possessing supreme and infinite wisdom, acts in the most perfect manner, not only metaphysically, but also morally speaking, and ... with respect to ourselves, we can say that the more enlightened and informed we are about God's works, the more we will be disposed to find them excellent and in complete conformity with what we might have desired. — Gottfried Leibniz
It is true that genius takes its rise out of the mountains of rectitude; that all beauty and power which men covet are somehow born out of that Alpine district; that any extraordinary degree of beauty in man or woman involves a moral charm. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
This we take it is the grand characteristic of our age. By our skill in Mechanism, it has come to pass, that in the management ofexternal things we excel all other ages; while in whatever respects the pure moral nature, in true dignity of soul and character, we are perhaps inferior to most civilised ages. — Thomas Carlyle
There are a million boys growing up in the United States who have never seen a saloon, and who will never know the handicap of liquor and this excellent condition will go on spreading over the country when the wet press and the paid propogandists of booze are forgotten. The abolition of the commercialized liquor trade in this country is as final as the abolition of slavery. — Henry Ford
In writing, as in life, faults are endured without disgust when they are associated with transcendent merit, and may be sometimes recommended to weak judgments by the lustre which they obtain from their union with excellence; but it is the business of those who presume to superintend the taste or morals of mankind to separate delusive combinations, and distinguish that which may be praised from that which can only be excused. — Samuel Johnson
The universe may be as great as they say. But it wouldn't be missed if it didn't exist. — Piet Pieterszoon Hein
For Immanuel Kant, the term anthropology embraced all the human sciences, and laid the foundation of familiar knowledge we need, to build solidly grounded ideas about the moral and political demands of human life. Margaret Mead saw mid-twentieth-century anthropology as engaged in a project no less ambitious than Kant's own, and her Terry Lectures on Continuities in Cultural Evolution provide an excellent point to enter into her reflections. — Margaret Mead
Part of the beauty and much of the moral seriousness of sport derives from the severe justice of strenuous play in a circumscribed universe of rules that protect the integrity of competition. Records are worth recording, and worth striving to surpass, because they serve as benchmarks of excellence achieved under the pressure of competition. — George Will
Moral excellence is an ornament for personal beauty; righteous conduct, for high birth; success for learning; and proper spending for wealth. — Chanakya
Of course, the age-old tradition that a star must appear even if he or she is practically dying is an excellent one, but it can be carried too far. I one played a performance of The Knight of the Burning Pestle with a temperature of 103 and gave sixteen members of the company mumps, thereby closing the play and throwing everybody out of work. There may be a moral lurking somewhere in this, but I cannot for the life of me discover what it is. — Noel Coward
Pope has elegantly said a perfect woman's but a softer man. And if we take in the consideration, that there can be but one rule of moral excellence for beings made of the same materials, organized after the same manner, and subjected to similar laws of Nature, we must either agree with Mr. Pope, or we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold. — Catharine Macaulay
The moral sense is the first excellence of well-organized man. — Thomas Jefferson
I think I would rather live on the verge of falling and let my security be in the all-sufficiency of the grace of God than to live in some pietistic illusion of moral excellence. Not that I don't want to be morally excellent but my faith isn't in the idea that I'm more moral than anybody else. My faith is in the idea that God and His love are greater than whatever sins any of us commit. — Rich Mullins
You've got to do some work now. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. Virtue is about moral excellence. — Francis Chan
If it were not somewhat fanciful to suppose that every human excellence is presented, as it were, in one kind of being, we might believe that the whole treasure of morality and order is enshrined in the female character. — Wilhelm von Humboldt
The imaginations of believers have dressed up and exaggerated the excellence of the style and matter of the New Testament generally, in the same manner, in which they have the moral instructions of Jesus. — Lysander Spooner
In Conclusion
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