Top 100 Quotes About Vices
#1. It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Rebecca West
#2. The little vices of the great must needs be accounted very great.
Publilius Syrus
#4. Soldiers have many vices, but vanity is not amongst them. How could it be? What man is going to worry about his hair when he might lose his head?
Sharon Kay Penman
#5. If you allowed yourselves to think of God, you wouldn't allow yourselves to be degraded by pleasant vices. You'd have a reason for bearing things patiently, for doing things with courage..
Aldous Huxley
#6. Whether a man hides his bad qualities and vices or confesses them openly, his vanity wants to gain an advantage by it in both cases: just note how subtly he distinguishes between those he will hide his bad qualities from and those he will face honestly and candidly.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#7. The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
William Hazlitt
#8. Philosophers conceive of the passions which harass us as vices into which men fall by their own fault, and, therefore, generally deride, bewail, or blame them, or execrate them, if they
wish to seem unusually pious.
Baruch Spinoza
#9. In mythology and religion, no less than in other spheres of life there is much in the way of self-serving interests, deceitfulness, mindlessness, and vices.
Luis E. Navia
#10. There are, then, three states of mind ... two vices
that of excess, and that of defect; and one virtue
the mean; and all these are in a certain sense opposed to one another; for the extremes are not only opposed to the mean, but also to one another; and the mean is opposed to the extremes.
Aristotle.
#11. Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.
Samuel Johnson
#12. No man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.
William Faulkner
#13. Mum once told Dad that vices are only vices when looked at through the frame of society.
Maggie Stiefvater
#14. 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
#15. Strangers are quick to help you because they don't have any grudges or vices to fall back on.
Crystal Evans
#16. People don't have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.
George Bernard Shaw
#17. He discovered in his heart the first faint whispering of pure Christianity, and in some way he continued to keep his virtue intact by keeping his vices active.
Thorne Smith
#18. The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#19. 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
#20. Indulge me, John. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money.
Mary Doria Russell
#21. People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but in itself.
William Hazlitt
#22. Yet I have a clever touch and pander to your vices. While looking on in exultation. And so I play my game, with the exuberance of experience, the strange and terribly subtle final aims of my Asiatic Blood that remain a mystery to you.
Paul Meyer
#23. Why do people not confess vices? It is because they have not yet laid them aside. It is a waking person only who can tell their dreams.
Seneca The Younger
#27. The great virtues of the German people have created more evils than idleness ever did vices
Paul Valery
#28. 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
#29. But that woman is an encyclopedia!
Of all vices, ancient and modern, and terribly interesting to leaf through!
Jean Lorrain
#30. Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.
Thomas Carlyle
#31. Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us.
Robert Staughton Lynd
#32. What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
William S. Paley
#33. I can never think of the time I spend idling in railway stations as lost; it's a waiting liberated from the three temporal vices of regret, anticipation or boredom, the weak echo of that bliss spent between lifetimes.
Eric Morecambe
#34. I was rather fond of her, but I was even fonder of my vices, my mania for running away from everywhere in search of God knows what, driven, I suppose, by stupid pride, by a sense of some sort of superiority
Louis-Ferdinand Celine
#35. No distinction is 'tween man and man,
But as his virtues add to him a glory
Or vices cloud him.
William Habington
#36. No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Charles Caleb Colton
#37. From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.
Mary Wollstonecraft
#39. If in the men who are supposed to be good they only see a "virtue" which is effectively less vital and less interesting than their own vices they will conclude that virtue has no meaning and will cling to what they have although they hate it.
Thomas Merton
#40. There is no evil that does not offer inducements. Vices tempt you by the rewards which they offer.
Seneca The Younger
#41. There are two public prosecutors, and one of them is at your door, punishing crimes against society; the other is nature herself. She is familiar with all those vices that escape the law.
Denis Diderot
#42. The vices of idleness are only to be shaken off by active employment.
Seneca The Younger
#43. It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Walter Bagehot
#44. You must master the vices. You know that if a thing is worth doing it's worth doing well. If, however, a thing is not worth doing then it's worth doing fabulously, amazingly, with grace, style and panache.
Isla Dewar
#45. Flatterers are always to blame for the vices which prevail among mankind
Moliere
#46. Try, start always at home. This is my encouragement to all writers, start at home. All virtues and vices begin at home, and then spread abroad.
Maya Angelou
#47. Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.
Michel De Montaigne
#48. Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. Avarice begets more vices than Priam did children and like Priam survives them all. It starves its keeper to surfeit those who wish him dead, and makes him submit to more mortifications to lose heaven than the martyr undergoes to gain it.
Charles Caleb Colton
#50. When I die," he continued, "you're next in line."
"Do you actually believe I'll outlive you?" West asked. "With my vices?"
"I have just as many."
"Yes, but I'm far more enthusiastic about mine.
Lisa Kleypas
#51. What are your chief vices? And virtues? I have no vices. The concept doesn't exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude
Truman Capote
#52. Remember, the prince is like a mirror exposed to the eyes of all his subjects who continually look to him as a pattern on which to model themselves, and who in consequence without much trouble discover his vices and virtues.
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor
#53. I do not love a man, except I hate his vices, because those vices are the enemies, and the destruction of that friend whom I love.
John Donne
#54. Beware of knowing your virtues; you may lose them. Beware of knowing your vices; you may forgive them.
James Richardson
#55. The story in that book of yours comes down to a sudden slipup caused by two great vices: women and laziness.
Kamel Daoud
#56. When I see throughout this book, called the Bible, a history of the grossest vices and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales and stories, I could not so dishonor my Creator by calling it by His name.
Thomas Paine
#57. 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
#58. Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
Samuel Butler
#59. 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.
#60. By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.
Edmund Burke
#61. 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
#62. Artificial civilization have originated wants, vices, and false tastes, which occasionally become so powerful as to stifle within us all good feelings, and ultimately to lead us into guilt and wickedness.
Alexandre Dumas
#63. Never can true courage dwell with them, Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look At their own vices.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#64. 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
#65. Logic in all its infinite potential, is the most dangerous of vices. For one can always find some form of logic to justify his action, and rest comfortably in the assurance, that what he did abides by reason. That is why, for us brittle beings, Intention is the only true weapon of peace.
Ilyas Kassam
#66. Cynicism and foul language are the only vices I'm presently capable of. Everything else takes energy or money. (64)
Mary Doria Russell
#68. To exterminate our popular vices is a work of far more importance to the character and happiness of our citizens than any other improvements in our system of education.
Noah Webster
#69. A lot of vices that I've had over the years were always to make up for some sort of character deficiency, one of them being shyness.
Slash
#70. If someone speaks badly of you, do not defend yourself against the accusations, but reply; you obviously don't know about my other vices, otherwise you would have mentioned these as well
Epictetus
#71. Men often mistake notoriety for fame, and would rather be noticed for their vices than not be noticed at all.
Harry Truman
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices.
Rubianne Wood
#75. I quit smoking the day I found out I was pregnant, which was nine years ago. But I'll still smoke in a movie. I have other vices, you know, like potato chips and chardonnay - but not together.
Jean Smart
#76. But though he had no striking vices, his virtues were perhaps almost as hard to define.
Susanna Clarke
#77. If we can spend more time uprooting vices and rooting virtues, our world will be safer and better.
Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
#78. 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
#79. The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Elizabeth Taylor
#80. Some vices only lay hold of us by means of others, and these, like branches, fall on removal of the trunk.
Blaise Pascal
#81. All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.
Morris West
#82. A thirsty ambition for truth and virtue, and a frenzy to conquer all lies and vices which are not recognized as such nor desire to be; herein consists the heroic spirit of the philosopher.
Johann Georg Hamann
#83. Arresting development, attacking science, and glorifying poverty is not the answer to the vices that attend prosperity.
Abdolkarim Soroush
#84. Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
Juvenal
#85. HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.
Ambrose Bierce
#86. Unlike other vices, cruelty, alas, is never boring.
Mason Cooley
#88. We tolerate without rebuke the vices with which we have grown familiar.
Publilius Syrus
#89. Anger. Infidelity. Death. Dark times - that's what these memories were. Ceony had passed through Emery's goodness and his hopes; it made sense to see his darkness, too. To see his hurts and his vices. To see the shadows cast behind those bright eyes.
Charlie N. Holmberg
#90. When anger is repressed by reason of inability to do immediate harm, it retires into the heart in the form of malice and breeds these vices - envy, triumph over the enemy's ill, repulsion of friendly approaches, contempt, slander, derision, personal violence, and injustice. MURDER
John Wortabet
#91. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls.
Victor Hugo
#93. The same vices which are huge and insupportable in others we do not feel in ourselves.
Jean De La Bruyere
#94. No writer besides Shakespeare has created more memorable characters attached to vices and virtues. In even their least sympathetic characters, one senses a kind of helplessness to passion quivering between the poles of good and evil.
Roger Rosenblatt
#95. Vices that are familiar we pardon, and only new ones reprehend.
Publilius Syrus
#96. Qualities that the world considers virtues will lead a leader to ruin, while those regarded as vices will often bring safety and prosperity. Good leadership requires a prince to "know how to do evil.
Ross King
#97. His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.
Orson Scott Card
#98. The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race.
Henry David Thoreau
#99. I cruelly hate cruelty, both by nature and reason, as the worst of all the vices. But then I am so soft in this that I cannot seea chicken's neck wrung without distress, and cannot bear to hear the squealing of a hare between the teeth of my hounds.
Michel De Montaigne
#100. He was as absurd as an Athenian demagogue, about whom Dr Faure had that morning been characteristically rude, since they were foreign, given to unnatural vices, and favoured democracy. Being thirteen, it was the unnatural vices that interested us.
Jonathan Grimwood
