Margaret Deland Quotes

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not having been vice.

It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them.

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.

Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

The worst education which teaches self-denial, is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that.

Self-denial is indispensable to a strong character, and the highest kind comes from a religious stock.

Integrity is the first step to true greatness. Men love to praise, but are slow to practice it. To maintain it in high places costs self-denial; in all places it is liable to opposition, but its end is glorious, and the universe will yet do it homage.

There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.

There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do. There's no virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted.

I didn't want to be greedy. It's a mark of bad character and I always believed that pigs go the slaughterhouse.

No man can purchase his virtue too dear, for it is the only thing whose value must ever increase with the price it has cost us. Our integrity is never worth so much as when we have parted with our all to keep it.

The life of a good man is a continual warfare with his passions.

Reading a novel in which all characters illustrate patience, hard work, chastity, and delayed gratification could be a pretty dull experience.

If I deny myself something, I just get resentful, so what's the point?

A prince must, above all things, accustom himself to moderate his desires. For as he has the power of gratifying them, if he once gives way to them, he will run to the greatest excess, and, by destroying his subjects, will at last complete his own ruin. In order to form himself to this moderation, nothing is more proper, than to accustom himself to patience. This is the most necessary of all virtues for those, who are to command. A man must be patient to become master of himself and others.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow's reality.

Far be it from me to ever let my common sense get in the way of my stupidity. I say we press on.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Great good nature without prudence is a great misfortune.

Sacrifice may be a flower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this flower that virtue set forth on its travels.

There is absolutely no common sense, it is common non-sense.

There is but on virtue--the eternal sacrifice of self.