Plutarch's Morals

§ xvii. Add, if you please, to what I have already said, as no small indication of progress in virtue, the thinking no wrong-doing small, but being on your guard and heed against all. For as people who despair of ever being rich make no account of small expenses, thinking they will never make much by adding little to little,298 but when hope is nearer fruition, then with wealth increases the love of it,299 so in things that have respect to virtue, not he that generally assents to such sayings as "Why trouble about hereafter?" "If things are bad now, they will some day be better,"300 but the man who pays heed to everything, and is vexed and concerned if vice gets pardon, when it lapses into even the most trifling wrongdoing, plainly shows that he has already attained to some degree of purity, and deigns not to contract defilement from anything whatever.

For the idea that we have nothing of any importance to bring disgrace upon, makes people inclined to what is little and careless.301 To those who are building a stone wall or coping it matters not if they lay on any chance wood or common stone, or some tombstone that has fallen down, as bad workmen do, heaping and piling up pell-mell every kind of material; but those who have made some progress in virtue, whose life "has been wrought on a golden base,"302 like the foundation of some holy or royal building, undertake nothing carelessly, but lay and adjust everything by the line and level of reason, thinking the remark of Polycletus superlatively good, that that work is most excellent, where the model stands the test of the nail.303