Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Quotes

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

I have seen men incapable of the sciences, but never any incapable of virtue.

In today's society, looking good and feeling good often trumps doing good and being good. And some people don't know the difference anymore.

Virtue is nothing but an act of loving that which is to be beloved, and that act is prudence, from whence not to be removed by constraint is fortitude; not to be allured by enticements is temperance; not to be diverted by pride is justice.

As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals. The combination is unstable and self-destroying.

Character is in turn the enduring source of virtue. It stands by itself and excites admiration in others. It is not obedience to authority, and while it is often consistent with and reinforced by religious belief, it is not piety.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

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

All the gold upon the earth and all the gold beneath it, does not compensate for lack of virtue.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

There is too much animal courage in society and not sufficient moral courage.

There is no greater wealth than Virtue,And no greater loss than to forget it.

If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

There will be no true freedom without virtue, no true science without religion, no true industry without the fear of God and love to your fellow citizens.

I have long served virtue, And never ta'en wages of her.

To be good and disagreeable is high treason against the royalty of virtue.

When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

A corrupt practice may be abolished, but a soiled imagination is not easily cleansed.

As long as the decent people refuse to believe that morality must manifest itself in every sphere of human activity, including the political, they will not meet the challenge of Marxism.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

One of the greatest artifices the devil uses to engage men in vice and debauchery, is to fasten names of contempt on certain virtues, and thus fill weak souls with a foolish fear of passing for scrupulous, should they desire to put them in practice.

Let fortune do her worst, whatever she makes us lose, so long as she never makes us lose our honesty and our independence.

Nothing of character is really permanent but virtue and personal worth.

Fundamentally, the force that rules the world is conduct, whether it be moral or immoral. If it is moral, at least there may be hope for the world. If immoral, there is not only no hope, but no prospect of anything but destruction of all that has been accomplished during the last 5,000 years.