Quotes About Vices

Virtue is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.

I object to rows because my nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy. I have another set of vices when I'm well, but those are the principal ones at present.

Save for the occasional use of cocaine, he had no vices, and he only turned to the drug as a protest against the monotony of existence when cases were scanty and the papers uninteresting.

There is more sense in your language, Bucklaw, replied the Master, than might have been expected from your conduct - it is too true, our vices steal upon us in forms outwardly fair as those of the demons whom the superstitious represent as intriguing with the human race, and are not discovered in their native hideousness until we have clasped them in our arms.

A wiser and more useful philosophy, however, directs us to consider man according to the nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities, which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no institution can strengthen; to vices, which no legislation can correct. Hence,

Changing prejudice often inverts the value of words while preserving most of their sense; virtues are turned into vices, artistic qualities become defects.

the partner of his guilt, should be hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation: in fine, that all those females whom he had sought, apparently on account of their virtue, had, since his departure, thrown even the mask aside, and had not scrupled to expose the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze.

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

It is easier to get on with vices than with virtues. The vices, accommodating by nature, help each other, are full of mutual indulgence, whereas the jealous virtues combat and annihilate each other, showing in everything their incompatibility and their intolerence

Religiile, ca ÅŸi ideologiile care le-au moÅŸtenit viciile, nu sunt decât cruciade împotriva umorului.

Conquest and Inquisition—parallel phenomena, products of Spain's imposing vices.

He who seeks to regulate everything by law is more likely to arouse vices than to reform them. It is best to grant what cannot be abolished, even though it be in itself harmful. How many evils spring from luxury, envy, avarice, drunkenness and the like, yet these are tolerated because they cannot be prevented by legal enactments.

The superstitious know how to reproach people for their vices better than they know how to teach them virtues, and they strive, not to guide men by reason, but to restrain them by fear, so that they flee the evil rather than love virtues. Such people aim only to make others as wretched as they themselves are, so it is no wonder that they are generally burdensome and hateful to men.

Alas, the vices of man, as horrifying as they are presumed to be, contain proof (if only in their infinite expansiveness!) of his bent for the infinite.

Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.

Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.

Capitalism is based on self-interest and self-esteem; it holds integrity and trustworthiness as cardinal virtues and makes them pay off in the marketplace, thus demanding that men survive by means of virtues, not of vices.

He did not owe the Nazis the truth about the manuscript any more than the hypothetical little girl in his essay owed her class the truth about her father's vices.

It was what Raymond Chandler would have called "a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.

Men often abstain from the grosser vices as too coarse and common for their appetites, while the vices which are frosted and ornamented are served up to them as delicacies.

The girls Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age. And if you yearn to meet your pioneers, You'll find them there, the same men, inbred sons Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same; A pioneer-island in a world that has No use for pioneers--the unsplit rock Of Fundamentalism, calomel, Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes And a harsh God.

Be at War with your Vices, at Peace with your Neighbours, and let every New-Year find you a better Man.