The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore guard accordingly and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.

I have always considered it as treason against the great republic of human nature to make any man's virtues the means of deceiving him.

He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune for they are impediments to great enterprises either of virtue or mischief.

Great souls are not those who have fewer passions and more virtues than others but only those who have greater designs.

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper.

When you sing with a group of people you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings - to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy the great social virtue.

Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness it certainly destroys liberty and it makes some virtues impracticable and others extremely difficult.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.