Top 100 Vice Virtue Quotes
#1. He that is good, will infallibly become better, and he that is bad, will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue and time are three things that never stand still.
Charles Caleb Colton
#2. Vice, virtue - it's best not to be too moral. You'll cheat yourself out of too much life.
Ruth Gordon
#3. There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
William Hazlitt
#4. Vice foments war; it is virtue which actually fights. If there were no virtue, we would live in peace forever.
Luc De Clapiers
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.
Charles Caleb Colton
#8. 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
#9. The common people do not judge of vice or virtue by morality or immorality, so much as by the stamp that is set upon it by men of figure.
Roger L'Estrange
#10. Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness.
Philip Massinger
#11. The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
#12. But we, Equality 7-2521, are glad to be living. If this is a vice, then we wish no virtue.
Ayn Rand
#13. 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
#14. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#15. Extremism is the pursuit of the presidency is an unpardonable vice. Moderation in the affairs of the nation is the highest virtue.
Lyndon B. Johnson
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would 'partake nothing of the sordid or sensual' (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.
Hannah Arendt
#20. 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
#21. Whoever passes forty without his virtue overpowering his vice, let him get ready for hellfire. This advice contains enough for people of knowledge.
Al-Ghazali
#22. He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
[On British Labour politician Stafford Cripps.]
Winston S. Churchill
#23. 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
#24. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.
Osamu Dazai
#26. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.
Adam Smith
#32. In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
Samuel Butler
#33. 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
#34. The most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men.
Plutarch
#35. The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.
Bergen Evans
#36. 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
#38. Self-improvement is generally a removal of a vice rather than an acquisition of a virtue.
Chris Matakas
#39. Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.
Seneca The Younger
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. Find joy in simplicity, self-respect, and indifference to what lies between virtue and vice. Love the human race. Follow the divine.
Marcus Aurelius
#45. Without enthusiasm, virtue functions not at all, and vice only poorly.
Mignon McLaughlin
#46. Desire is a great virtue, but expectation is an even greater vice.
Raheel Farooq
#47. A man is fortunate if he encounters living examples of vice, as well as of virtue, to inspire him.
Brendan Behan
#48. Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.
Aristotle.
#50. 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
#51. I used to suppose that certain evils could never befall a being in possession of a sound mind; that true virtue supplies us with energy which vice can never resist; that it was always in our power to obstruct, by his own death, the designs of an enemy who aimed at less than our lives.
Charles Brockden Brown
#52. As far as I'm concerned, I prefer silent vice to ostentatious virtue.
Albert Einstein
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. What makes Existence really nice Is Virtue
with a dash of Vice.
Harry Graham
#58. There have certainly been many periods in history when virtue was more rare than under the Caesars; but there has probably never been a period when vice was more extravagant or uncontrolled.
William Edward Hartpole Lecky
#59. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.
David Brooks
#60. Though the wisdom or virtue of one can very rarely make many happy, the folly or vice of one man often make many miserable.
Samuel Johnson
#61. Virtue liberates; vice enslaves. A passion for genuine beauty liberates;
Anthony Esolen
#62. I forsee a marked deterioration in American musicand a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue - or rather by vice - of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines
John Philip Sousa
#63. Vice, like virtue, Grows in small steps, and no true innocence Can ever fall at once to deepest guilt.
Jean Racine
#64. 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
#65. Ambition, in a private man is a vice, is in a prince the virtue.
Philip Massinger
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. One needs to be either more brave or more good, because if courage is lacking goodness can substitute, while cowardice is the deficiency of both.
Neel Burton
#69. Virtue may not always make a Face handsome, but Vice will certainly make it ugly.
Benjamin Franklin
#70. 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
#71. Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.
Mason Cooley
#72. Vice stings us even in our pleasures, but virtue consoles us even in our pains.
William Cowper
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue.
Kiese Laymon
#78. 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
#79. Show me a man without vice and I'll show you one without virtue!
Pittacus Lore
#80. 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
#81. We are human less by virtue of our ideal goals than by the vice of our inferiority.
James Hillman
#82. Nonviolence is the greatest virtue, cowardice the greatest vice - nonviolence springs from love, cowardice from hate.
Mahatma Gandhi
#84. 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
#86. 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
#87. Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.
William Shakespeare
#88. He, who practices right, but in the hope of acquiring great renown, is very near to vice.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#89. 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
#90. The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Oliver Goldsmith
#91. The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Henry Bolingbroke
#92. It is, but a virtue taken to extremes is a vice. If one does not understand there are things more important than the truth one doesn't understand how important the truth is.
Javier Cercas
#93. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
Henry David Thoreau
#94. Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.
Quintilian
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. I prefer an interesting vice to a virtue that bores.
Moliere
#99. For the honest people, relations increase with the years. For the vicious, inconveniences increase. Inconstancy is the defect of vice; the influence of habit is one of the qualities of virtue.
Suzanne Curchod
#100. Virtue is health, vice is sickness.
Petrarch
