Quotes About Vice And Virtue

#1. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

Oscar Wilde

#2. The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

Samuel Butler

#3. Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men,
the Good and the Bad.
But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

David Hume

#4. It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

Eric Hoffer

#5. It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

Julien Offray De La Mettrie

#6. Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world.

Isaac Watts

#7. Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.

Andre Breton

#8. There are some who write, talk, and think, so much about vice and virtue, that they have no time to practice either the one or the other.

Charles Caleb Colton

#9. There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

William Hazlitt

#10. Because impudence is a vice, it does not follow that modesty is a virtue; it is built upon shame, a passion in our nature, and may be either good or bad according to the actions performed from that motive.

Bernard De Mandeville

#11. of light and life, thou Good Supreme! O teach me what is good; teach me Thyself! Save me from folly, vanity, and vice, From every low pursuit; and fill my soul With knowledge, conscious peace, and virtue pure; Sacred, substantial, never-fading bliss!

Benjamin Franklin

#12. The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.

Charles Caleb Colton

#13. Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

Harriet Martineau

#14. Without knowledge there can be no sure progress. Vice and barbarism are the inseparable companions of ignorance. Nor is it too much to say that, except in rare instances, the highest virtue is attained only through intelligence.

Charles Sumner

#15. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment. There

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#16. I travel the broad path as is the way of youth, I give myself to vice unmindful of virtue, I am eager for the pleasure of the flesh more than salvation, my soul is dead and I shall look after the flesh.

Carl Orff

#17. What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?
Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,
My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,
I moisten the roots of all that has grown.

Walt Whitman

#18. If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue - and not a vice - to love myself, since I am a human being too.

Erich Fromm

#19. He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
[On British Labour politician Stafford Cripps.]

Winston S. Churchill

#20. It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

Hosea Ballou

#21. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.

Osamu Dazai

#22. The universe is all about balance. The forces of light and darkness are meant to keep a check on one another. If one becomes too powerful and starts overrunning the other, that balance will be upset. For the tyranny of virtue is as unbearable as the stranglehold of vice.

Shatrujeet Nath

#23. No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.

Jean De La Bruyere

#24. The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn't it?

Kevin Dutton

#25. In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Samuel Butler

#26. Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune ...

Jose Saramago

#27. She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.

Oliver Goldsmith

#28. Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.

Seneca The Younger

#29. For centuries kings, priests, feudal lords, industrial bosses and parents have insisted that obedience is a virtue and that disobedience is a vice.

Erich Fromm

#30. Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

#31. Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow the divine.

Marcus Aurelius

#32. Without enthusiasm, virtue functions not at all, and vice only poorly.

Mignon McLaughlin

#33. Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

Aristotle.

#34. Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

Thomas Paine

#35. Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.

David Hume

#36. The amount of electricity that has been saved in spite of Vice President Cheney saying that efficiency is only a moral virtue ... and that you need increased supply like ANWR-is two ANWRs worth of energy.

Stephen Schneider

#37. Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

#38. Vice, like virtue, Grows in small steps, and no true innocence Can ever fall at once to deepest guilt.

Jean Racine

#39. The characteristic virtue of Englishmen is power of sustained practical activity and their characteristic vice a reluctance to test the quality of that activity by reference to principles.

R. H. Tawney

#40. I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.

William H. Seward

#41. But jest apart
what virtue canst thou trace
In that broad trim that hides thy sober face?
Does that long-skirted drab, that over-nice
And formal clothing, prove a scorn of vice?
Then for thine accent
what in sound can be
So void of grace as dull monotony?

George Crabbe

#42. There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

Henry Fielding

#43. It is among the evils of slavery that it taints the very sources of moral principle. It establishes false estimates of virtue and vice: for what can be more false and heartless than this doctrine which makes the first and holiest rights of humanity to depend upon the color of the skin?

John Quincy Adams

#44. Marriage is the preserver of the human race. Without it, the purposes of God would be frustrated; virtue would be destroyed to give place to vice and corruption, and the earth would be void and empty.

Joseph Fielding Smith

#45. I take it to be from the greatest extremes, both in virtue and in vice, that the uniformly virtuous and reformed in life can derive the greatest and most salutary truths and impressions.

Deborah Sampson

#46. Hypocrisy is said to be the homage that vice pays to virtue, - decorum is the outward expression of that homage; and if this be so, we must acknowledge that vice has latterly grown very humble indeed.

Charles Robert Maturin

#47. Show me a man without vice and I'll show you one without virtue!

Pittacus Lore

#48. The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

George Grosz

#49. Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization.

Marquis De Sade

#50. There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

Theodore Dalrymple

#51. Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.

William Shakespeare

#52. A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

W. H. Auden

#53. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

Henry David Thoreau

#54. If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Samuel Johnson

#55. Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbor is superior to oneself.

Aleister Crowley

#56. Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Moliere

#57. The evil that is in this world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that however isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue;

Albert Camus

#58. To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.

George Berkeley

#59. That which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.

David Hume

#60. The drama is the looking-glass in which we see the hideousness of vice and the beauties of virtue.

Fanny Kemble

#61. It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected; that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue; and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.

Edward Gibbon

#62. I hate when vice can bolt her arguments,
And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

John Milton

#63. I see compassion may become a justice, though it be a weakness, I confess, and nearer a vice than a virtue.

Ben Jonson

#64. Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

C.S. Lewis

#65. Vice can deceive under the guise and shadow of virtue.

Juvenal

#66. The happiness and unhappiness of the rational, social animal depends not on what he feels but on what he does; just as his virtue and vice consist not in feeling but in doing.

Marcus Aurelius

#67. Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint thy follies and vices as thou shalt never, by their will, discover good from evil, or vice from virtue.

Walter Raleigh

#68. There are so many things that are incompatible with a single life. No one can learn fully in one life the lessons of unbroken health and of bodily sickness, of riches and of poverty, of study and action, of comradeship and isolation, of defiance and of obedience, of virtue and of vice.

J.M.E. McTaggart

#69. To secure approval one must remain within the bounds of conventional mediocrity. Whatever lies beyond, whether it be greater insight and virtue, or greater stolidity and vice, is condemned. The noblest men, like the worst criminals, have been done to death.

John Lancaster Spalding

#70. Good is that which elevates the mind, and evil, is that which degrades the mind. Social virtue and vice are temporal entities. These things have nothing to do with a person's relationship with the Supreme.

Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar

#71. The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.

Charles Caleb Colton

#72. Virtue and vice are both prophets; the first, of certain good; the second, of pain or else of penitence.

Ralph Venning

#73. Somehow strangely the vice of men gets well represented and protected but their virtue has none to plead its cause - nor any charter of immunities and rights.

Henry David Thoreau

#74. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#75. Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair.

Blaise Pascal

#76. The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.

Quintilian

#77. It has been ordained that there be summer and winter, abundance and dearth, virtue and vice, and all such opposites for the harmony of the whole, and (Zeus) has given each of us a body, property, and companions.

Epictetus

#78. There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#79. Adorn thyself with simplicity and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow God. The poet says that Law rules all. And it is enough to
remember that law rules all.

Marcus Aurelius

#80. To hold fealty to your own and to call it a high virtue is ludicrous. Even animals protect their own. It is a good, but it is a common good, an easy one. It's a miser who says he grows rich not for himself, but for his children. His vice is not thus magically made virtue.

Brent Weeks

#81. In our system of governance, there is no higher virtue than participation and no greater vice than apathy.

Nick Ragone

#82. If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

Samuel Johnson

#83. Counsel and conversation is a good second education, that improves all the virtue and corrects all the vice of the former, and of nature itself.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl Of Clarendon

#84. Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.

Charles Caleb Colton

#85. The soul may be compared to a field of battle, where the armies are ready every moment to encounter. Not a single vice but has a more powerful opponent, and not one virtue but may be overborne by a combination of vices.

Oliver Goldsmith

#86. Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it.

Samuel Beckett

#87. [The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.

Edward Gibbon

#88. He who wishes to preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue.

Guglielmo Ferrero

#89. Because he hates to praise by name
He praises everybody. Vice
And virtue must look much the same
To one who calls the whole world "nice".

Marcus Valerius Martialis

#90. Virtue that wavers is not virtue, but vice revolted from itself, and after a while returning. The actions of just and pious men do not darken in their middle course.

John Milton

#91. One truth remains clear through the doubts and the questions, whether sinful or sanctified, virtue or vice:
While the past may belong to the Buddhists and Christians, the future belongs to the Buddhas and Christs.

Eric Micha'el Leventhal

#92. We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

Henry David Thoreau

#93. Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

Epictetus

#94. Virtue consists in avoiding vice, and is the highest wisdom.
[Lat., Virtus est vitium fugere, et sapientia prima.]

Horace

#95. Purity and virtue scarcely differ from vice, if they're not free of malice

Anton Chekhov

#96. Adorn thyself with simplicity and modesty and with indifference towards the things which lie between virtue and vice. Love mankind. Follow

Marcus Aurelius

#97. If we can spend more time uprooting vices and rooting virtues, our world will be safer and better.

Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha

#98. For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right

Edmund Spenser

#99. If virtue cannot shine bright, but by the conflict of contrary appetites, shall we then say that she cannot subsist without the assistance of vice, and that it is from her that she derives her reputation and honor?

Michel De Montaigne

#100. When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly.

Paul Krugman