“The vices are corruptive and destructive habits. They undermine both our goodness of character and our living and acting well...[The vices] have a corrosive effect on our lives...they eat away at our ability to see things clearly, appreciate things as we ought, live in healthy relationships with others, and refrain from self-destructive patterns of behavior.”
“When you lose awareness of sin and start thinking that, deep down, human beings are pretty wonderful, you lose the struggle of character building. Building character is not like being better than someone else at a career. It’s conquering your own weakness. But you won’t make that effort if you lose a sense of what your weakness is and where it comes from.”
“Character...will generate the sort of behavior that rules might have pointed toward but which a ‘rule-keeping’ mentality can never achieve. And it will produce the sort of life which will in fact be true to itself. Though the ‘self’ to which it will at last be true is the redeemed self...not the merely ‘discovered’ self of popular thought...The name for this way of being human, this kind of transformation of character, is virtue.” -NT Wright
“Virtue, in this strict sense, is what happens when someone has made a thousand small choices, requiring effort and concentration, to do something which is good and right but which doesn’t ‘come naturally’ and then, on the thousand and first time, when it really matters, they find that they do what’s required ‘automatically’ as we say.” -NT Wright