Bayard Taylor Quotes

It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil.

The ordeal of virtue is to resist all temptation to evil.

I really wanted to be nasty and mean and bad. It's so much easier than being the good girl.

Character is much easier kept than recovered.

Nothing makes it easier to resist temptation than a proper bringing-up, a sound set of values - and witnesses.

'Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Plato said that virtue has no master. If a person does not honor this principle and rejoice in it, but is purchasable for money, he creates many masters for himself.

If I wanted to do wrong, I could not.

You oughtn't to yield to temptation. Well, somebody must, or the thing becomes absurd.

If you would not step into the harlot's house, do not go by the harlot's door.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Modesty is the color of virtue.

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

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

I have raised the morals and sobriety of the people.

The superior man thinks always of virtue; the common man thinks of comfort.

No one can harm the man who does himself no wrong.

Virtue is a positive quality developed by taking a firm stand for the right in temptation, or by the suffering endured in consequence of wrongdoing.

It's obviously a lot harder to try and be a good guy than it is to be a bad guy. The world is a fundamentally evil place, it seems like. So in order to be a good person, you have to fight temptation and vice.

It is safest to be moderately base - to be flexible in shame, and to be always ready for what is generous, good, and just, when anything is to be gained by virtue.

Power is not alluring to pure minds.

Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.

Man is most happy, when his own actions are arguments and examples of his virtue.

Moral character has now some influence in our elections, but not that place which it deserves. The law of public opinion excludes confirmed sots, and persons judicially convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors against the State; but it ought to render the election of all profane swearers, notorious Sabbath breakers, seducers, slanderers, prodigals and riotous persons, as well as the advocates of dueling, impracticable.