Quotes About Vices

Qualities that the world considers virtues will lead a leader to ruin, while those regarded as vices will often bring safety and prosperity. Good leadership requires a prince to "know how to do evil.

It is ridiculous not to escape from one's own vices, which is possible, while trying to escape the vices of others, which is impossible.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

I was infatuated once with a foolish, besotted affection, that clung to him in spite of his unworthiness, but it is fairly gone now--wholly crushed and withered away; and he has none but himself and his vices to thank for it.

However little you may esteem them as individuals, it is not pleasant to be looked upon as a liar and a hypocrite. To be thought to practice what you abhor. And to encourage the vices you would discountenance. To find your good intentions frustrated and your hands crippled by your supposed unworthiness, and to bring disgrace on the principles you profess.

however little you may value the opinions of those about you—however little you may esteem them as individuals, it is not pleasant to be looked upon as a liar and a hypocrite, to be thought to practise what you abhor, and to encourage the vices you would discountenance, to find your good intentions frustrated, and your hands crippled by your supposed unworthiness, and to bring disgrace on the principles you profess.

Besides, the old man was out of shape, smoked and drank--a walking heart attack.

Soldiers have many vices, but vanity is not amongst them. How could it be? What man is going to worry about his hair when he might lose his head?

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.

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.

He also embraced a cyclical theory of history. History, he believed, flowed in cycles. Infant nations were virtuous and uncorrupted, but with age they grew tainted, eventually falling into decline and succumbing to their encumbering maladies and vices.

Just as Don Quixote, whose preposterous idealism and touchy pride immediately struck a chord with the Spanish, so Pinocchio speaks to Italians in a very special way as a caricature of many of their national virtues and vices.

algunos preferimos, supongo, los vicios que nos divierten a las virtudes que nos aburren.

La avaricia es la causa de todos los vicios.

He who is accustomed to this Sin of Gluttony may no Sin withstand. He must be in bondage to all vices, for it is in the Devil's hoard where he hides himself and takes his rest.

People don't have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent.

If any one will here contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. In

We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.

Memory's vices are also its virtues, elements of a bridge across time that allows us to link the mind with the world.

The King of France—the heir of so long a line of royalty—the King, who had discarded the vices of his predecessors, and proved himself the friend of the people, was to be incarcerated in the worst prison in Paris by the vote of that very Assembly which he had himself called into existence.

for we are noble in only one way, but bad in all sorts of ways.