Adam Smith Quotes

Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.

Virtue is a habit of the mind, consistent with nature and moderation and reason.

I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.

Men of most renowned virtue have by transgressing most truly kept the law.

Honesty: The ability to resist small temptations.

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

One of the standards on which your happiness is based, now and in your future, is moral purity.

Virtues, like essences, lose their fragrance when exposed.

Great and good are seldom the same man.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

My pet peeve and my goal in life is to somehow get an adjective for 'integrity' in the dictionary. 'Truthful' doesn't really cover it, or 'genuine.' It should be like 'integritus.'

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Virtue is defined to be mediocrity, of which either extreme is vice.

Virtue is reason which has become energy.

To keep your character intact you cannot stoop to filthy acts. It makes it easier to stoop the next time.

I believe that ideal character in its perfection is potentially in every man who is born into the world.

They err … who think that virtue consists of words .. good actions are the glory of virtue.

The only way to survive among the evil and corrupt is to be even more wicked and more corrupt than they are!

I'm really tired of virtue.

Though a man cannot abstain from being weak, he may from being vicious.

Virtuous people are simply those who have not been tempted sufficiently, because they live in a vegetative state, or because their purposes are so concentrated in one direction that they have not had the leisure to glance around them.

High moral character is not a precondition for great moral accomplishments.

The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.

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

The strength of a man's virtue should not be measured by his special exertions, but by his habitual acts.