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Virtues are not emotions. Emotions are movements of appetite, virtues dispositions of appetite towards movement. Moreover emotions can be good or bad, reasonable or unreasonable; whereas virtues dispose us only to good. Emotions arise in the appetite and are brought into conformity with reason; virtues are effects of reason achieving themselves in reasonable movements of the appetites. Balanced emotions are virtue’s effect, not its substance.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), Italian philosopher, theologian. Summa Theologica, pt. 1, 2nd pt., qu. 59, art. 1 (1273).

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