Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.
However evil men may be they dare not be openly hostile to virtue, and so when they want to attack it they pretend to find it spurious , or impute crimes to it.
Whilst weakness and timidity keep us to our duty, virtue has often all the honor.
What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.
If vanity does not entirely overthrow the virtues, at least it makes them all totter.
To praise princes for virtues they do not possess is to insult them without fear of consequences.
Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.
Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.
It is often laziness and timidity that keep us within our duty while virtue gets all the credit.
Repentance is not so much remorse for what we have done as the fear of the consequences.
Nature seems at each man's birth to have marked out the bounds of his virtues and vices, and to have determined how good or how wicked that man shall be capable of being.
The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.
We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.
It is a mighty error to suppose that none but violent and strong passions, such as love and ambition, are able to vanquish the rest. Even idleness, as feeble and languishing as it is, sometimes reigns over them; it usurps the throne and sits paramount over all the designs and actions of our lives, and imperceptibly wastes and destroys all our passions and all our virtues.
Of all our faults, the one we avow most easily is idleness; we persuade ourselves that it is allied to all the peaceable virtues,and as for the others, that it does not destroy them utterly, but only suspends the exercise of their functions.
Women's virtue is frequently nothing but a regard to their own quiet and a tenderness for their reputation.
High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light.
Moderation is represented as a virtue in order to restrain the ambition of great men, and to console those of a meaner condition in their lesser merit and fortune.
Men frequently do good only to give themselves opportunity of doing ill with impunity.
Clemency, which we make a virtue of, proceeds sometimes from vanity, sometimes from indolence, often from fear, and almost always from a mixture of all three.
The courage of a great many men, and the virtue of a great many women, are the effect of vanity, shame, and especially a suitabletemperament.
Virtue is to the soul what health is tot he body.
Vices are ingredients of virtues just as poisons are ingredients of remedies. Prudence mixes and tempers them and uses them effectively against life's ills.
For the credit of virtue we must admit that the greatest misfortunes of men are those into which they fall through their crimes.
Humility is the sure evidence of Christian virtues. Without it, we retain all our faults still, and they are only covered over with pride, which hides them from other men's observation, and sometimes from our own too.
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