Vices Quotes - Page 14

• The higher mental activities are pretty tough and resilient, but it is a devastating experience if the drive does stop. Some people lose it in their forties and can only stop. In England they are a source of Vice-Chancellors.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  People, Doe, England

  John Edensor Littlewood, Béla Bollobás (1986). “Littlewood's Miscellany”, p.196, Cambridge University Press

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• It costs more to maintain ten vices than one virtue.

  H. L. Mencken

  Cost, Virtue, Ten

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• If Washington were President now, he would have to learn our ways or lose his next election. Only fools and theorists imagine that our society can be handled with gloves or long poles. One must make one's self a part of it. If virtue won't answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington's day as it is now, and always will be.

  Henry Adams

  Self, Long, Office

  Henry Adams (2015). “Democracy”, p.82, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• The drama is the looking-glass in which we see the hideousness of vice and the beauties of virtue.

  Fanny Kemble

  Drama, Glasses, Virtue

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• Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

  Fashion, Age, Generations

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• It were better for a man to be subject to any vice than to drunkenness; for all other vanities and sins are recovered, but a drunkard will never shake off the delight of beastliness.

  Walter Raleigh

  Men, Vanity, Delight

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• Flatterers are the worst kind of traitors, for they will strengthen thy imperfections, encourage thee in all evils, correct thee in nothing, but so shadow and paint thy follies and vices as thou shalt never, by their will, discover good from evil, or vice from virtue.

  Walter Raleigh

  Evil, Imperfection, Shadow

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• Self-love, as it happens to be well or ill conducted, constitutes virtue and vice.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Self, Virtue, Ill

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• It may be said that the vices await us in the journey of life like hosts with whom we must successively lodge; and I doubt whether experience would make us avoid them if we were to travel the same road a second time.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Journey, Doubt, May

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• The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Medicine, Poison, Use

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• A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.

  James Mackintosh

  Self, Harbors, Variance

  Sir James Mackintosh (1834). “A general view of the progress of ethical philosophy: chiefly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, p.117

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• Should you be unfortunate enough to have vices, you may, to a certain degree, even dignify them by a strict observance of decorum;at least they will lose something of their natural turpitude.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Degrees, May, Enough

  Lord Chesterfield (1998). “Lord Chesterfield's Letters”, p.381, Oxford Paperbacks

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• The rulers of the earth are all worth knowing; they suggest moral reflections: and the respect that one naturally has for God's vice-regents here on earth is greatly increased by acquaintance with them.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Leadership, Reflection, Knowing

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• Out of the ashes of misanthropy benevolence rises again; we find many virtues where we had imagined all was vice, many acts of disinterested friendship where we had fancied all was calculation and fraud--and so gradually from the two extremes we pass to the proper medium; and, feeling that no human being is wholly good or wholly base, we learn that true knowledge of mankind which induces us to expect little and forgive much. The world cures alike the optimist and the misanthrope.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Two, Feelings, Forgiving

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• It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Doors, Brain, Able

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• The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  World, Language, Virtue

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• Be not under the dominion of thine own will; it is the vice of the ignorant, who vainly presume on their own understanding.

  Miguel de Cervantes

  Understanding, Ignorant, Dominion

  Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1851). “The History of Don Quixote de la Mancha”, p.321

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• 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

  Years, People, Quality

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• To me avarice seems not so much a vice as a deplorable piece of madness.

  Thomas Browne

  Pieces, Madness, Seems

  Sir Thomas Browne, Claire Preston (1995). “Selected Writings”, p.30, Psychology Press

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• After a tongue has once got the knack of lying, it is not to be imagined how impossible almost it is to reclaim it. Whence it comes to pass, that we see some men, who are otherwise very honest, so subject to this vice.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Lying, Men, Knack

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• Lying is a disgraceful vice, and one that Plutarch paints in most disgraceful colors, when he says that it is "affording testimony that one first despises God, and then fears men." It is not possible more happily to describe its horrible, disgusting, and abandoned nature; for can we imagine anything more vile than to be cowards with regard to men, and brave with regard to God.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Lying, Men, Color

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• Our virtues live upon our incomes; our vices consume our capital.

  Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

  Income, Virtue

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• The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Heart, Passionate, Poet

  'Maud' (1855) pt. 1, sect. 4, st. 7

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• When we are sick our virtues and our vices are in abeyance.

  Luc de Clapiers

  Sick, Virtue

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• We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Real, Men, Doe

  Gilbert K. Chesterton (2013). “The Essential Gilbert K. Chesterton”, p.148, Simon and Schuster

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