 Because of the diverse conditions of humans, it happens that some acts are virtuous to some people, as appropriate and suitable to them, while the same acts are immoral for others, as inappropriate to them. Author: Thomas Aquinas |
| Happiness is secured through virtue; it is a good attained by man's own will. Author: Thomas Aquinas |
| Perfection of moral virtue does not wholly take away the passions, but regulates them. Author: Thomas Aquinas |
| Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains. Author: William Cowper |
| To be innocent is to be not guilty; but to be virtuous is to overcome our evil inclinations. Author: William Penn |
| God seeth different abilities and frailties of men, which may move His goodness to be merciful to their different improvements in virtue. Author: William Law |
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| We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness - today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve, but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own. Author: William Law |
| Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world. Author: Isaac Watts |
| Many things are possible for the person who has hope. Even more is possible for the person who has faith. And still more is possible for the person who knows how to love. But everything is possible for the person who practices all three virtues. Author: Brother Lawrence |
| It is harder to die to our virtues than to our vices; but the one is just as necessary as the other for perfect union. Our attachments are the stronger as they are more spiritual. Author: Madame Guyon |
| Why should we complain that we have been stripped of the divine virtues, if we had not hidden them away as our own? Why should we complain of a loss, if we had no property in the thing lost? or why does deprivation give us so much pain, except because of the appropriation we had made of that which was taken away? Author: Madame Guyon |
| Some saints have been sanctified by the easy and determined practice of all the virtues, but there are others who owe their sanctification to having endured with perfect resignation the privation of every virtue. Author: Madame Guyon |
