Quotes about virtue and vice

Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practises it will have neighbors.

Is virtue a thing remote? I wish to be virtuous, and lo! virtue is at hand.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

For the love of money is the root of all evil

Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

Something wicked this way comes.

The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall

We need greater virtues to sustain good than evil fortune.

We frequently do good to enable us with impunity to do evil.

A man would rather say evil of himself than say nothing.

As rivers are lost in the sea so are virtues in self.

There are both heroes of evil and heroes of good.

The name of virtue is as useful to our interest as that of vice.

Virtue would not go far did not vanity escort her.

Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.

Interest sets at work all sorts of virtues and vices.

No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

We only appreciate our good or evil in proportion to our self-love.

Fortune makes visible our virtues or our vices, as light does objects.

We try to make a virtue of vices we are loth to correct.

Weakness is more hostile to virtue than vice.

Vanity makes us sin more against our taste than reason.

We are most dishonourable towards our God: he is not PERMITTED to sin.

When one trains one’s conscience, it kisses one while it bites.

There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.

One is punished best for one’s virtues.

From the senses originate all trustworthiness, all good conscience, all evidence of truth.

What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.

Not only our reason, but also our conscience, truckles to our strongest impulse—the tyrant in us.

Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice.

There is a haughtiness of kindness which has the appearance of wickedness.

The ridiculous springs from a moral contrast innocently presented to the senses.

Where I cannot be moral, my power is gone.

The spirit of wrath—not the words—is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

ACADEME, n. An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

AGE, n. That period of life in which we compound for the vices that we still cherish by reviling those that we have no longer the enterprise to commit.

ASPERSE, v.t. Maliciously to ascribe to another vicious actions which one has not had the temptation and opportunity to commit.

CALLOUS, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another.

CHILDHOOD, n. The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

CHRISTIAN, n. One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

CLOCK, n. A machine of great moral value to man, allaying his concern for the future by reminding him what a lot of time remains to him.

COENOBITE, n. A man who piously shuts himself up to meditate upon the sin of wickedness; and to keep it fresh in his mind joins a brotherhood of awful examples.

CONDOLE, v.i. To show that bereavement is a smaller evil than sympathy.

CONSERVATIVE, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.

DAY, n. A period of twenty-four hours, mostly misspent. This period is divided into two parts, the day proper and the night, or day improper—the former devoted to sins of business, the latter consecrated to the other sort. These two kinds of social activity overlap.

DEGRADATION, n. One of the stages of moral and social progress from private station to political preferment.

DELUGE, n. A notable first experiment in baptism which washed away the sins (and sinners) of the world.

DIGESTION, n. The conversion of victuals into virtues. When the process is imperfect, vices are evolved instead—a circumstance from which that wicked writer, Dr. Jeremiah Blenn, infers that the ladies are the greater sufferers from dyspepsia.

EAVESDROP, v.i. Secretly to overhear a catalogue of the crimes and vices of another or yourself.

EXCESS, n. In morals, an indulgence that enforces by appropriate penalties the law of moderation.

EXHORT, v.t. In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

FIDELITY, n. A virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

FORGETFULNESS, n. A gift of God bestowed upon doctors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.

GLUTTON, n. A person who escapes the evils of moderation by committing dyspepsia.

HEAVEN, n. A place where the wicked cease from troubling you with talk of their personal affairs, and the good listen with attention while you expound your own.

HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

HOSPITALITY, n. The virtue which induces us to feed and lodge certain persons who are not in need of food and lodging.

HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

IMPENITENCE, n. A state of mind intermediate in point of time between sin and punishment.

KORAN, n. A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

MANICHEISM, n. The ancient Persian doctrine of an incessant warfare between Good and Evil. When Good gave up the fight the Persians joined the victorious Opposition.

MEDAL, n. A small metal disk given as a reward for virtues, attainments or services more or less authentic.

MORAL, adj. Conforming to a local and mutable standard of right. Having the quality of general expediency.

MUGWUMP, n. In politics one afflicted with self-respect and addicted to the vice of independence. A term of contempt.

OATH, n. In law, a solemn appeal to the Deity, made binding upon the conscience by a penalty for perjury.

PATIENCE, n. A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.

PERSEVERANCE, n. A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.

PHILANTHROPIST, n. A rich (and usually bald) old gentleman who has trained himself to grin while his conscience is picking his pocket.

PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously. A Pilgrim Father was one who, leaving Europe in 1620 because not permitted to sing psalms through his nose, followed it to Massachusetts, where he could personate God according to the dictates of his conscience.

PILLORY, n. A mechanical device for inflicting personal distinction—prototype of the modern newspaper conducted by persons of austere virtues and blameless lives.

PRICE, n. Value, plus a reasonable sum for the wear and tear of conscience in demanding it.

REPENTANCE, n. The faithful attendant and follower of Punishment. It is usually manifest in a degree of reformation that is not inconsistent with continuity of sin.

RICE-WATER, n. A mystic beverage secretly used by our most popular novelists and poets to regulate the imagination and narcotize the conscience. It is said to be rich in both obtundite and lethargine, and is brewed in a midnight fog by a fat witch of the Dismal Swamp.

RIME, n. Agreeing sounds in the terminals of verse, mostly bad. The verses themselves, as distinguished from prose, mostly dull. Usually (and wickedly) spelled “rhyme.”

ROSTRUM, n. In Latin, the beak of a bird or the prow of a ship. In America, a place from which a candidate for office energetically expounds the wisdom, virtue and power of the rabble.

RUIN, v. To destroy. Specifically, to destroy a maid’s belief in the virtue of maids.

SAUCE, n. The one infallible sign of civilization and enlightenment. A people with no sauces has one thousand vices; a people with one sauce has only nine hundred and ninety-nine. For every sauce invented and accepted a vice is renounced and forgiven.

UN-AMERICAN, adj. Wicked, intolerable, heathenish.

VIRTUES, n.pl. Certain abstentions.

Wall STREET, n. A symbol of sin for every devil to rebuke. That Wall Street is a den of thieves is a belief that serves every unsuccessful thief in place of a hope in Heaven. Even the great and good Andrew Carnegie has made his profession of faith in the matter.

WEREWOLF, n. A wolf that was once, or is sometimes, a man. All werewolves are of evil disposition, having assumed a bestial form to gratify a beastial appetite, but some, transformed by sorcery, are as humane as is consistent with an acquired taste for human flesh.

Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.

The evil that we do does not attract to us so much persecution and hatred as our good qualities.

Pride has a larger part than goodness in our remonstrances with those who commit faults, and we reprove them not so much to correct as to persuade them that we ourselves are free from faults.

Whatever difference there appears in our fortunes, there is nevertheless a certain compensation of good and evil which renders them equal.

Truth does not do as much good in the world, as its counterfeits do evil.

Idleness and fear keeps us in the path of duty, but our virtue often gets the praise.

Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poison into that of medicines. Prudence collects and blends the two and renders them useful against the ills of life.

For the credit of virtue we must admit that the greatest misfortunes of men are those into which they fall through their crimes.

We admit our faults to repair by our sincerity the evil we have done in the opinion of others.

We do not despise all who have vices, but we do despise all who have not virtues.

It seems that nature has at man’s birth fixed the bounds of his virtues and vices.

We may say vices wait on us in the course of our life as the landlords with whom we successively lodge, and if we travelled the road twice over I doubt if our experience would make us avoid them.

When our vices leave us we flatter ourselves with the idea we have left them.

The reason which often prevents us abandoning a single vice is having so many.

There are men of whom we can never believe evil without having seen it. Yet there are very few in whom we should be surprised to see it.

Lucky people are bad hands at correcting their faults; they always believe that they are right when fortune backs up their vice or folly.

Nothing is so infectious as example, and we never do great good or evil without producing the like. We imitate good actions by emulation, and bad ones by the evil of our nature, which shame imprisons until example liberates.

It would seem that even self-love may be the dupe of goodness and forget itself when we work for others. And yet it is but taking the shortest way to arrive at its aim, taking usury under the pretext of giving, in fact winning everybody in a subtle and delicate manner.

No one should be praised for his goodness if he has not strength enough to be wicked. All other goodness is but too often an idleness or powerlessness of will.

There are people whose faults become them, others whose very virtues disgrace them.

A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.

There are persons of whom the world approves who have no merit beyond the vices they use in the affairs of life.

Natural goodness, which boasts of being so apparent, is often smothered by the least interest.

There are wicked people who would be much less dangerous if they were wholly without goodness.

Moderation is made a virtue to limit the ambition of the great; to console ordinary people for their small fortune and equally small ability.

To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is but to reproach them with impunity.

We often comfort ourselves by the weakness of evils, for which reason has not the strength to console us.

There are certain defects which well mounted glitter like virtue itself.

Humility is the true proof of Christian virtues; without it we retain all our faults, and they are only covered by pride to hide them from others, and often from ourselves.

The evils we do to others give us less pain than those we do to ourselves.

There are virtues which degenerate into vices when they arise from Nature, and others which when acquired are never perfect. For example, reason must teach us to manage our estate and our confidence, while Nature should have given us goodness and valour.

If vanity does not overthrow all virtues, at least she makes them totter.

Of all our faults that which we most readily admit is idleness: we believe that it makes all virtues ineffectual, and that without utterly destroying, it at least suspends their operation.

We often credit ourselves with vices the reverse of what we have, thus when weak we boast of our obstinacy.

In the old age of love as in life we still survive for the evils, though no longer for the pleasures.

There is often more pride than goodness in our grief for our enemies’ miseries; it is to show how superior we are to them, that we bestow on them the sign of our compassion.

There exists an excess of good and evil which surpasses our comprehension.

However wicked men may be, they do not dare openly to appear the enemies of virtue, and when they desire to persecute her they either pretend to believe her false or attribute crimes to her.

Jealousy is the worst of all evils, yet the one that is least pitied by those who cause it.

“Knowledge for its own sake”—that is the last snare laid by morality: we are thereby completely entangled in morals once more.

To be ashamed of one’s immorality is a step on the ladder at the end of which one is ashamed also of one’s morality.

Our vanity would like what we do best to pass precisely for what is most difficult to us.—Concerning the origin of many systems of morals.

That which an age considers evil is usually an unseasonable echo of what was formerly considered good—the atavism of an old ideal.

If a man thinks about his physical or moral condition, he generally finds that he is ill.

The man who acts never has any conscience; no one has any conscience but the man who thinks.

The world of empirical morality consists for the most part of nothing but ill-will and envy.

There is no virtue in subordinating oneself; but there is virtue in descending, and in recognising anything as above us, which is beneath us.

There is no outward sign of politeness that will be found to lack some deep moral foundation. The right kind of education would be that which conveyed the sign and the foundation at the same time.

It is failings that show human nature, and merits that distinguish the individual; faults and misfortunes we all have in common; virtues belong to each one separately.

The incurable evil of religious controversy is that while one party wants to connect the highest interest of humanity with fables and phrases, the other tries to rest it on things that satisfy no one.

In Sakontala the poet appears in his highest function. As the representative of the most natural condition of things, the finest mode of life, the purest moral endeavour, the worthiest majesty, and the most solemn worship, he ventures on common and ridiculous contrasts.

Distrust all those who love you extremely upon a very slight acquaintance, and without any visible reason. Be upon your guard, too, against those, who confess, as their weaknesses, all the cardinal virtues.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.