All Virtues
Cheerfulness
Author:
Position:
Company:
Brendan Steven
Chief Writer
UJA Federation of Greater Toronto
“I live in a constant endeavor to fence against the infirmities of ill health, and other evils of life, by mirth; being firmly persuaded that every time a man smiles, but much more when he laughs, it adds something to his fragment of life.”
Laurence Sterne
Detachment
Author:
Position:
Company:
David McKernan
Entrepreneur
David Joseph Inc.
“Detachment is not indifference. it is the prerequisite for effective involvement. Often what we think is best for others is distorted by our attachments to our opinions. We want others to be happy in the way we think they should be happy. It is only when we want nothing for ourselves that we are able to see clearly into others needs and understand how to serve them.”
Mahatma Gandhi
Industriousness
Author:
Position:
Company:
Peter Copeland
Director of Policy & Stakeholder Relations
Ontario’s Solicitor General
“Some temptations come to the industrious, but all temptations attack the idle.”
Charles Spurgeon
“To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle as well.”
Henry Ward Beecher
Patience
Author:
Position:
Company:
Rachelle Ezechiels
Operations Manager
Newman Centre Catholic Mission
"Patience is one of the humble, workaday virtues; but it is, in a real sense, the root and guardian of all virtues, not causing them, but removing obstacles to their operation. Do away with patience and the gates are open for a flood of discontent and sin."
St. Thomas Aquinas, comp. to Summa, III, 394
Studiousness
Author:
Position:
Company:
Geoffrey Woollard
PhD student in Computer science
University of British Columbia
“Studiositas [diligence] means especially this: that a person resists the nearly inescapable temptation to indiscipline with all the power of selfless self-protection, that he radically closes off the inner space of his life against the pressingly unruly pseudo-reality of empty sounds and sights - in order that, through and only through this asceticism of perception, he might safeguard or recoup that which truly constitutes man's living existence: to perceive the reality of God and of creation and to shape himself and the world by the truth that discloses itself only in silence.”
Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart
Temperance
Author:
Position:
Company:
David Marshall
Advisory, Consulting
JKM Financial Corp
“Temperance is a tree which has for its root very little contentment, and for its fruit calm and peace.”
Gautama Buddha
“The well-ordered mind knows the value, no less than the charm, of reticence. The fruit of the tree of knowledge ... falls ripe from its stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of digestion.”
Agnes Repplier