Virtuous

Famous quotes containing the word virtuous:

    What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The truth is, as every one knows, that the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading, and it is highly improbable that the thing has ever been done by a virtuous woman.
    —H.L. (Henry Lewis)

    The sage belongs to the same obsolete repertory as the virtuous maiden and the enlightened monarch.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)