quotations about vice
Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.
FRANCIS BACON
Essays
It is not by a hair-cloth or a whip that vices are subdued. These things inconvenience the body, but surely do not improve the soul.
JEAN DAILLÉ
An Exposition of the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Philippians
Since, therefore, vices are contrary to virtue, the whole systems must of necessity differ from and be contrary to each other. Because vices are commotions and perturbations of the soul; virtue, on the contrary, is mildness and tranquility of mind.
LACTANTIUS
The Sacred Writings of Lactantius
My hate is general, I detest all men;
Some because they are wicked and do evil,
Others because they tolerate the wicked,
Refusing them the active vigorous scorn
Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.
MOLIÈRE
The Misanthrope
Vice is a monster of so frightful mien
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.
ALEXANDER POPE
Essay on Man
If your potential vice is cheesecake, for instance ... you may consciously limit your access and make sure you aren't surrounded by things that elicit cravings for that cheesecake. Or you may ensure you have easy access to fruit, or to another healthy cheesecake substitute. In a gambling situation, you may set spending limits before you start betting. In any situation, you might think about alternative rewards, like spending time with your family.
GREG BRUCE
"What is a vice and how do we get over them?", New Zealand Herald, April 22, 2017
Vice is its own reward. It is virtue which, if it is to be marketed with consumer appeal, must carry Green Shield stamps.
QUENTIN CRISP
The Naked Civil Servant
It is but a step from companionship to slavery when one associates with vice.
HOSEA BALLOU
Treasury of Thought
One of the affecting features in a life of vice is the longing, wistful outlooks given by the wretches who struggle with unbridled passions, towards virtues which are no longer within their reach. Men in the tide of vice are sometimes like the poor creatures swept down the stream of mighty rivers, who see people safe on shore, and trees, and flowers, as they go quickly past; and all things that are desirable gleam upon them for a moment to heighten their trouble, and to aggravate their swift-coming destruction.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
We try to make a virtue of vices we are loath to correct.
FRANÇOIS DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
JOSEPH PULITZER
attributed, Joseph Pulitzer: Reminiscences of a Secretary (An Adventure with a Genius)
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
Women Talking Dirty
I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Notes from the Underground
Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
CHARLES DICKENS
Dombey and Son
There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.
MARCEL PROUST
Swann's Way
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What I Saw in America
What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
Human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain.
MILO
"Aquinas and Augustine Were Radical Progressives", Breitbart, January 31, 2017
The martyrs to vice, far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number. So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words
I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion.
CHARLES ROBERT MATURIN
Melmoth the Wanderer