Passages about virtue and character

A prince who wants to keep his position must learn how not to be good, and must use that knowledge or hold it back as necessity requires.

Because men are ungrateful and break their bonds the moment it profits them, fear, which a prince controls, is a safer foundation than love, which he does not.

The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.

I am very conscious that I am not wise at all; what then does the god mean?

Nothing in the world, or even out of it, can possibly be conceived which could be called good without qualification except a good will.

Act only according to that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt?

I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

For it is not histories that I am writing, but lives.

A small thing, a phrase or a joke, often shows character better than battles with thousands of dead and the greatest sieges.

The existence of God can be proved in five ways.

Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

What do I know?

There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge.

Then we ought not to retaliate or render evil for evil to any one, whatever evil we may have suffered from him.

Socrates says that they should follow not the opinion of the many about what is just but the opinion of the one who understands it, as a man in training listens to his trainer rather than to the crowd.

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of wo that is in mariage.

A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows, since he knows it, and in that case is in no need of searching; nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for.

For seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection.

They make a desert and call it peace.

The histories of Tiberius and Caligula, of Claudius and Nero, were falsified through cowardice while they flourished, and composed, when they fell, under the influence of still rankling hatreds.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

Seek not that the things which happen should happen as you wish; but wish the things which happen to be as they are, and you will have a tranquil flow of life.

In every republic there are two different inclinations, that of the people and that of the great men, and all the laws that are made in favour of liberty are born of the disunion between them.

For as good customs have need of laws to maintain them, so laws have need of good customs in order to be observed.

Supposing truth is a woman, what then?

He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

My tongue swore, but my mind is unsworn.

We know the good and recognise it, but we do not work it out, some from idleness, and some from preferring some other pleasure to the good.

Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, seashores, and mountains, but it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.

Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God.

Faith is precisely this paradox, that the single individual is higher than the universal.

He who loved himself became great by himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotion, but he who loved God became greater than all.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.

Life is short, the art long, opportunity fleeting, experiment perilous, and judgement difficult.

It is not, in my opinion, any more divine or more sacred than other diseases, but has a natural cause, and its supposed divine origin is due to men's inexperience and to their wonder at its peculiar character.

I would rather that my lyre were out of tune and discordant, and that the chorus I led should be, and that most men should disagree with me, than that I, being one, should be out of harmony with myself and contradict myself.

Nature herself shows that it is just for the better man to have more than the worse, and the more powerful than the less.

The foundation of justice is good faith, that is, steadiness and truthfulness in what is said and agreed.

There are two ways of settling a dispute: by discussion and by force. Since the first is proper to man and the second to beasts, we should resort to the second only when the first is not available.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see.

Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us to the point where we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

What part of life is not sorrowful and unpleasant, dull, insipid and troublesome, unless you add pleasure to it, that is to say, a seasoning of folly?

Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part?

I know you all, and will awhile uphold the unyoked humour of your idleness.

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o' Wednesday.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary.

Cover that bosom, which I cannot endure to look on. Such things damage the soul and stir up sinful thoughts.

There is a great difference between hypocrisy and devotion.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

In the second century of the Christian era, the Empire of Rome comprehended the fairest part of the earth, and the most civilised portion of mankind.

History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

Actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.

It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.

We must acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or practise from time to time what has been learnt? Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?

What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

I did not bid you tell me one or two of the many pious actions but that form itself that makes all pious actions pious.

If you associate with me, on the very day you will go home a better man, and the same the next day, and every day you will get better and better.

Zeus, fearing that our race would be wholly destroyed, sent Hermes to bring justice and shame to men, and ordered that all should have a share, for cities cannot exist if only a few share in them as in the other arts.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.

Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible.

Of things some are in our power, and others are not. In our power are opinion, movement towards a thing, desire, aversion; and in a word, whatever are our own acts. Not in our power are the body, property, reputation, offices, and in a word, whatever are not our own acts.

Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things.

The secret of empire was now revealed, that an emperor could be made elsewhere than at Rome.

By general consent he would have been judged capable of ruling, if only he had never ruled.

A Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine, / Ycladd in mightie armes and silver shielde, / Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine, / The cruell markes of many a bloody fielde.

Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere, I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, and with forced fingers rude shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise (that last infirmity of noble mind) to scorn delights, and live laborious days.

I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.

You are very fortunate, Father, to be able to say that, for otherwise I should have thought it a great sin.

I want us to be men, and on every occasion for the bottom of our hearts to show itself in what we say.

Sometimes it is a sign of honesty to hide what one thinks. Would it be right to tell a thousand people what one feels about them?

A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world.

I imagine the minds of children as easily turned this or that way as water itself.

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

Act so that the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time as a principle of a universal legislation.

Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

The Fox and the Grapes: unable to reach the grapes, the fox declared them sour and walked away.

The Tortoise and the Hare: slow and steady wins the race.

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

The text opens by warning that the Tao which can be named is not the eternal Tao, announcing directly that its own central subject, the way that underlies and generates all things, exceeds ordinary language's capacity to fully capture or define it.

The text repeatedly returns to water as its central image for genuine strength, observing that water wears down even the hardest stone not through force or direct confrontation but through patient softness and constant, yielding persistence over time.

An unnamed Athenian stranger walks with a Cretan and a Spartan to the cave of Zeus and drafts a legal code for a new colony called Magnesia, drawing comparatively on multiple actual historical legal traditions rather than constructing purely from abstract principle.

Over twelve books the speakers discuss the purpose of law, education, drinking parties, music, marriage, property, crime and punishment, and religion, with the preludes to each law meant to persuade citizens before compelling them rather than relying on bare command alone.

Inwood and Gerson translate and number the fragments and reports from Diogenes Laertius, Cicero, Plutarch, Stobaeus, Sextus Empiricus and others, arranged by topic, logic, physics, ethics, reconstructing Stoic doctrine's systematic architecture from scattered secondary sources.

The collection is the standard way for students to read what the Stoics actually argued about fate, the passions, virtue and the rational cosmos, giving readers direct access to positions otherwise recoverable only through this careful scholarly reconstruction.

You have a right to your actions, but never to the fruits of your actions. Do not let the fruits be the motive for your actions, and do not let your attachment be to inaction.

The soul is never born, and never dies. It is not slain when the body is slain. Weapons cannot cut it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it away.

Friendship can only exist between good men, Laelius insists, and by good he means those who act with such good faith, integrity, fairness and generosity that nothing base or self-serving is mixed into their conduct.

He tells his sons-in-law that he can bear Scipio's death because Scipio himself, at the height of his fortune, needed nothing further from life, and that his own grief is for his own loss rather than any harm that has come to his friend.

Cato tells Scipio and Laelius that old age is a heavy burden only for those who have nothing within themselves to rely on, while for those who look to their own resources, nothing that nature makes necessary can seem truly burdensome.

He argues that it is not by physical strength or speed that great things are achieved, but by deliberation, judgment and settled opinion, qualities old age does not diminish but actually tends to increase.

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.

We know that a person is justified not by the works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ.

On Anger argues against Aristotle that anger is never useful, describes with unpleasant vividness what it does to a face and a household, and prescribes a daily examination of conscience, giving abstract philosophical argument concrete documentary force.

On Mercy is addressed to the young Nero, whose tutor Seneca was, and tries to persuade an absolute ruler that clemency is in his own interest, giving the treatise genuine biographical stakes beyond abstract political theory alone.

Tacitus describes the Germans in general, their land, warfare, kings and assemblies, religion, marriage customs and love of drinking and gambling, in the essay's first half.

The essay surveys the individual tribes from the Rhine to the Baltic in its second half, naming and locating peoples whose own accounts of themselves do not survive.

The Moralia collects Plutarch's seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, including practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection includes a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics that extends moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways anticipating considerably later philosophical developments on this question.

Epictetus states that men are disturbed not by the things that happen, but by their opinions about the things that happen, so that death itself is nothing terrible, since if it were it would have appeared so to Socrates, but the terror lies entirely in our own judgment that death is terrible.

He compares life to a play whose length and character the author has already determined, and insists that our own task is simply to act well the part that has been given us, whether that part is short or long, a beggar's or a king's, since choosing the role is not up to us but acting it well entirely is.

Scepticism is the ability to set appearances and arguments against one another so that the mind suspends judgement and tranquillity follows, a genuinely active method rather than mere passive absence of belief that Sextus lays out systematically.

The first book lays out the ten modes of Aenesidemus and the five modes of Agrippa for producing suspension of judgement, giving Pyrrhonism a systematic technical apparatus transforming skeptical practice into methodical, teachable technique.

The poem begins by praising the awakening mind, confesses faults and generates the resolve, establishing the bodhisattva vow to attain enlightenment for the sake of all beings as the practice's central organizing and motivating principle throughout.

The chapter on patience argues against anger, and the meditation chapter teaches the exchange of self and other, offering a genuinely concrete practical technique for cultivating compassion through systematic contemplative exercise rather than abstract aspiration alone.

John summarizes the accumulated teaching of the Greek Fathers on the Trinity, organizing several centuries of theological development into a single coherent account of God's triune nature, a systematizing achievement rather than new doctrinal innovation.

He addresses at length the incarnation and the two natures and two wills of Christ, human and divine, a central and historically contested Christological question that had generated considerable theological controversy across the preceding centuries of Greek patristic debate.

The idea of the philosopher, supreme ruler, prince, legislator and imam is but a single idea.

Human happiness cannot be attained except through the theoretical virtues, the deliberative virtues, the moral virtues and the practical arts, present in a nation or a city.

Marie names herself directly as the author of these twelve lais, stating that she is retelling stories she heard from Breton minstrels, a claimed source that frames her considerable shaping intelligence as preservation and translation rather than pure invention.

In Bisclavret, a knight who is secretly a werewolf is betrayed by his own wife, who steals his clothes to trap him permanently in wolf form, and the tale's actual moral center rests not in his lycanthropy itself but in her specific betrayal of his trust.

Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to see again the stars, and Dante writes that to course over better waters the small vessel of his talent now hoists sail, leaving behind so cruel a sea.

Virgil explains that neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, natural or of the mind, and that natural love is never in error, but the love of the mind can err in its object, or in too much or too little vigor.

At Arthur's New Year feast a huge green knight offers to take a blow from an axe if the striker will accept one in return a year later, Gawain beheads him, and the knight picks up his head and rides off, establishing the poem's central binding wager.

At a castle on the way, a lord proposes to exchange each day's winnings while the lady of the house tries to seduce him, and Gawain accepts a green girdle said to protect him and hides it, a single significant lapse within otherwise scrupulous honor.

Froissart describes the English longbowmen at Crécy cutting down wave after wave of mounted French knights, a battle that shattered French confidence in the traditional cavalry charge and marked, though Froissart does not frame it this way explicitly, a genuine turning point in how European warfare would be conducted.

Froissart recounts how six leading burghers of Calais, dressed in sackcloth with ropes around their necks, offered their own lives to Edward III in exchange for sparing their starved, besieged city, a gesture of chivalric self-sacrifice Froissart presents as the war's most morally exemplary single episode.

I began to examine myself and my behavior as a natural woman, and similarly I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, and I could not see or realize, after taking real note of it, that the testimony of so many notable men could be false.

Reason tells her that the surest way to refute those who attack women is to prove, by manifest deduction and demonstrable examples, both past and present, that a great number of women have always devoted themselves to learning and the arts.

The first book warns directly against learning pursued without humility, insisting that intellectual sophistication and theological knowledge accomplish little of genuine spiritual value if pursued without the corresponding interior humility that alone makes such learning actually useful to the soul.

The second book turns inward to the interior life, treating sustained self-examination and interior transformation, rather than external religious observance considered on its own, as the genuine substance of Christian spiritual practice the reader is being guided toward.

Luther distinguishes alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ given entirely from outside a person and received purely through faith, from proper righteousness, the ordinary righteousness of good conduct and just dealing that grows out of the first rather than producing it.

Alien righteousness swallows up sin at once upon being received through faith, Luther argues, even though its full implications and effects continue working themselves out gradually across an entire lifetime of sustained faith rather than resolving immediately and completely.

Luther defines the key words of Romans in turn, law, sin, grace, faith, righteousness, flesh and spirit, building a compact systematic account of his theology through careful attention to the epistle's own specific vocabulary rather than abstract independent argument.

Luther argues that sin is not simply the wrong act but the unbelieving heart behind it, and that the law cannot cure this underlying condition but only exposes it, since no amount of correct outward behavior touches the actual unbelief driving sinful action.

Roper, who lived in More's household for sixteen years, records More's rise to Lord Chancellor and his conversations with Henry VIII in the garden at Chelsea, giving readers direct firsthand access to the personal dynamic between king and chancellor.

More refuses to swear the oath acknowledging the king's supremacy over the church, is imprisoned in the Tower, and is tried on the testimony of Richard Rich, Roper recording the actual pressures and arguments More faced rather than idealized retrospective summary.

Sidney argues that poetry is the oldest of learning and the best teacher of virtue, because it joins the philosopher's precept to the historian's example in a golden world of its own making, combining abstraction's generality with narrative's concrete particularity.

Sidney answers the charges that poets lie and corrupt, treating poetry's fictional status not as a liability requiring apology but as the very source of its distinctive pedagogical power, addressing moral objections to literature with unusual philosophical seriousness.

The rebellion continues after Shrewsbury but is ended by a trick, when Prince John promises the rebel lords redress and then arrests them once their army disperses, stages political victory through betrayal of given word rather than honorable combat.

Falstaff, now old and ill, recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire and dines with Justice Shallow, while the sick king broods on the crown he took, giving the play's comic relief genuine melancholy undertone alongside the king's own mortality.

Returning from war to Messina, the young lord Claudio falls for Hero, the governor's daughter, while Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice resume a running battle of insults their friends will need only manipulate into acknowledged mutual attraction.

The prince's bastard brother Don John stages a scene that makes Claudio think Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio denounces her at the altar, staging a genuinely brutal public humiliation the play's title ironically frames as much ado about nothing.