THE DANGER IN OUR VIRTUES

'When we're young, so much time is spent keeping our vices in check. Our anger, our envy, our pride. But when I look around, it seems to me that so many of our lives end up being hampered by a virtue instead. If you take a trait that by all appearances is a merit - a trait that is praised by pastors and poets, a trait that we have come to admire in our friends and hope to foster in our children - and you give it to some poor soul in abundance, it will almost certainly prove an obstacle to their happiness.'

Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway, p.495.

SIMPLISTIC DESCRIPTIONS

One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some a particular way - said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but very river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy, or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently he is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.'

Leo Tolstoy in David Brooks, How to Know a Person, p.36.

PARENTING THE VIRTUES

'As far as the education of children is concerned I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but love for one's neighbour and self-denial ; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.'

Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues, p.151.