Top 100 Quotes About Our Vices
#1. We implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them.
Blaise Pascal
#2. If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?
John Churton Collins
#3. We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.
Saint Augustine
#4. When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.
Luc De Clapiers
#5. Our virtues make us; but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times.
Hilary Mantel
#6. If we tread our vices under our feet, we make of them a ladder by which to rise to higher things.
Saint Augustine
#7. Our vices always lie in the direction of our virtues, and in their best estate are but plausible imitations of the latter.
Henry David Thoreau
#8. Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.
Charles Caleb Colton
#9. Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices.
Jean-Baptiste Rousseau
#10. Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
Charles Caleb Colton
#11. The gods are strange. It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.
Oscar Wilde
#12. Saint Augustine! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame A ladder, if we will but tread Beneath our feet each deed of shame.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#13. We may form free constitutions, but our vices will destroy them; we may enact laws, but they will not protect us.
Lyman Beecher
#15. We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
Daniel J. Boorstin
#17. We are more inclined to regret our virtues than our vices; but only the very honest will admit this.
Holbrook Jackson
#18. As far as I am concerned, I know that I have lost not wealth but distractions. The body's needs are few: it wants to be free from cold, to banish hunger and thirst with nourishment; if we long for anything more we are exerting ourselves to serve our vices, not our needs.
Seneca.
#20. We endeavor to conceal our vices under the disguise of the opposite virtues.
Henry Fielding
#21. In our ideals we unwittingly reveal our vices.
Jean Rostand
#22. We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.
Livy
#23. We're all servants. Some to our fellow men. Some to our vices.
S. S. Van Dine
#24. We should every night call ourselves to an account;
What infirmity have I mastered today?
What passions opposed? What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired? Our vices will abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
Seneca.
#25. Affectation proceeds from one of these two causes,
vanity or hypocrisy; for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavor to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues.
Henry Fielding
#26. their morals, at first as slightly giving way, anon how they sunk more and more, then began to fall headlong, until he reaches the present times, when we can neither endure our vices, nor their remedies.
Livy
#27. I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.
C.S. Lewis
#28. So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.
Edward Dahlberg
#30. It is not the stars that make us, Dr. Butts, it is circumstance and necessita, the choices we make under pressure; our virtues make us, but virtues are not enough, we must deploy our vices at times. Or don't you agree?
Hilary Mantel
#31. Our virtues are voluntary (and in fact we are in a sense ourselves partly the cause of our moral dispositions, and it is our having a certain character that makes us set up an end of a certain kind), it follows that our vices are voluntary also; they are voluntary in the same manner as our virtues.
Aristotle.
#32. Karma brings us ever back to rebirth, binds us to the wheel of births and deaths. Good Karma drags us back as relentlessly as bad, and the chain which is wrought out of our virtues holds as firmly and as closely as that forged from our vices.
Annie Besant
#33. The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
#35. I had a dream about you last night. Our vices had wings and our fears could breathe fire. There was nowhere to hide and we were trapped alive. So you reached for your sword and slashed my arm, waking me and saving my life.
Crystal Woods
#36. Our vices are attempts to combine self-medication and enjoyment.
Mason Cooley
#37. Neither our vices nor our virtues further the poem.
William Dunbar
#38. How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#39. We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.
Saint Augustine
#40. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.
Thomas Paine
#41. The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.
Thomas Merton
#42. High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#43. Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.
Aristotle.
#44. We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#46. The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
William Shakespeare
#47. Deliberate cruelty to our defenceless and beautiful little cousins is surely one of the meanest and most detestable vices of which a human being can be guilty.
William Ralph Inge
#48. It is the restrictions placed on vice by our social code which makes its pursuit so peculiarly agreeable.
Kenneth Grahame
#49. Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
William Cowper
#50. Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
Theodore Roosevelt
#51. There is nothing we can now call our own, for what we call so is the effect of art; crimes are made by decrees of the senate, or by the votes of the people; and as here-to-fore we are burdened by vices, so now we are oppressed by laws.
Blaise Pascal
#52. The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.
C.S. Lewis
#53. One way or another we all work for our vice.
Ben Maddow
#54. The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects. Over time, we fail and come to find our end, but the city continues onwards.
Cristina Martin
#56. When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy
Jack Ruby
#57. But he had something else to curse
his own viscious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away.
George Eliot
#58. If our life is to resemble the gospel, we must shun, not merely the grosser vices, but everything that would hinder our perfect conformity to Christ.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#60. In particular, our church will have to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy, and illusionism[28] as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment.[
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#61. We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.
Maxwell Maltz
#62. Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?
Alexander The Great
#63. Our religion is made to eradicate vices, instead it encourages them, covers them, and nurtures them.
Michel De Montaigne
#64. Though we may sometimes unintentionally bestow our beneficence on the unworthy, it does not take from the merit of the act. For charity doth not adopt the vices of its objects.
Henry Fielding
#65. Birth is nothing without virtue, and we have no claim to share in the glory of our ancestors unless we endeavor to resemble them.
Moliere
#66. Envy is more irreconcilable than hate. It is the most corroding of all political vices and also a great power in our land. The friends of freedom are content to be envied, but envy not.
Hans F. Sennholz
#67. [...] as with all vices, vast and lucrative industries are ready to supply the necessary material. It sometimes seems as if most of the news consists of outrage porn, selected specifically to pander to our impulse to judge and punish, to get us off on righteous indignation.
Tim Kreider
#68. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues - like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his 'bad days' and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I
C.S. Lewis
#69. Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity, but affectation appears to be the only true source of the ridiculous.
Henry Fielding
#70. We should be carefree with our bodies and prudish with our brains, not the contrary. How virtuous we are with our flesh, and yet the first foul thought that comes our way is invited to the depths of our soul.
Anthony Marais
#71. unless an evil thought is born in a twisted mind, human nature is repelled by crime. However, civilization has given us needs, vices and artificial appetites which sometimes cause us to repress our good instincts and lead us to wrongdoing.
Alexandre Dumas
#72. Adolescence is a sort of underworld we have to live through. Everything is in us, even vice and crime. At the same time we discover free will. I wonder that it doesn't tear us off our bases for good and all.
Grace Zaring Stone
#73. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.
Victor Hugo
#74. To make judgements about great and lofty things, a soul of the same stature is needed; otherwise we ascribe to them that vice which is our own.
Michel De Montaigne
#75. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.
Henry David Thoreau
#76. Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
Juvenal
#77. We are more speedily and fatally corrupted by domestic examples of vice, and particularly when they are impressed on our minds as from authority.
Horace
#78. If we can spend more time uprooting vices and rooting virtues, our world will be safer and better.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#79. It is the common vice of all, in old age, to be too intent upon our interests.
Terence
#80. We never like the smell of our own vices in other people, Holmes. Ah, let's steer here for a drink or two," Lowell suggested.
Matthew Pearl
#81. When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. The saint maintains his piety through the graphic imagination of other people's vices. We thank him for it. The saint's impossible perfection allows us to go on being gargoyles while keeping our faith alive. We admire him for it. The saint's silence covers far more than our interpretations of it.
Ranjit Hoskote
#83. May the humanity that is within every human being be held precious. The vice that underlies all vices is that we are held cheap by others, and far worse, that in our innermost soul we think cheaply of ourselves.
Felix Adler
#84. Whatever folly men commit, be their shortcomings or their vices what they may, let us exercise forbearance; remember that when these faults appear in others it is our follies and vices that we behold.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#85. Unless we suppress our conscience, we naturally know basic moral truths. General virtues and vices, Thomas Reid wrote, "must appear self-evident to every man who has a conscience, and has taken the pains to exercise this natural power of his mind" ("Of Morals").
Anonymous
#86. You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#87. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
T. S. Eliot
#90. Materialism and self-centeredness are the great vices of our age.
Billy Graham
#91. All vices sink into our whole being, if we do not crush them before they gain a footing; and in like manner these sad, pitiable, and discordant feelings end by feeding upon their own bitterness, until the unhappy mind takes a sort of morbid delight in grief.
Seneca.
#92. We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
Denis Diderot
#95. How often do we contradict the right rules of reason in the whole course of our lives! Reason itself is true and just, but the reason of every particular man is weak and wavering, perpetually swayed and turned by his interests, his passions, and his vices.
Jonathan Swift
#96. The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.
David Hume
#97. What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone.
William Gilmore Simms
#98. We do not sustain ourselves in virtue by our own strength, but by the balancing of two opposed vices, just as we remain upright amidst two contrary gales. Remove one of the vices, and we fall into the other.
Blaise Pascal
#99. Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.
William Graham Sumner
#100. We should treat with indulgence every human folly,
failing, and vice, bearing in mind that what we have
before us are simply our own failings, follies, and vices.
Arthur Schopenhauer
