quotations about vice
What maintains one vice would bring up two children.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin
The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.
REBECCA WEST
The Thinking Reed
Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
CHARLES DICKENS
Dombey and Son
The martyrs to vice, far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number. So blinded are we by our passions, that we suffer more to be damned than to be saved.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon; or, Many Things in Few Words
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
G. K. CHESTERTON
What I Saw in America
No one gossips about other people's secret virtues.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
On Education
The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Vanity Fair
He hasn't a single redeeming vice.
OSCAR WILDE
Epigrams: An Anthology
There is not a crime, there is not a dodge, there is not a trick, there is not a swindle, there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy.
JOSEPH PULITZER
attributed, Joseph Pulitzer: Reminiscences of a Secretary (An Adventure with a Genius)
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
The heart resolves this matter in a trice:
Men only feel the smart, but not the vice.
ALEXANDER POPE
Imitations of Horace
Virtue makes us appear amiable to others; vice, contemptible even to ourselves.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
The bow well bent and smart and spring,
Vice seems already slain;
But passion rudely snaps the string,
And it revives again.
WILLIAM COWPER
"Human Frailty"
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.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Life Thoughts
So in the wicked there's no vice
Of which the saints have not a spice.
SAMUEL BUTLER
Hudibras
The man who has no vices probably has some of the worst virtues.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
We may say, vices wait on us in the course of our life as the landlords with whom we successively lodge, and if we traveled the road twice over, I doubt if our experience would make us avoid them.
LA ROCHEFOUCAULD
attributed, Encyclopædia of Quotations: A Treasury of Wisdom, Wit and Humor, Odd Comparisons and Proverbs
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice.
GRAHAM GREENE
The Power and the Glory
All vices are for a time; for they are excited for the present. The impetuosity of anger is appeased when vengeance has been taken; the pleasure of the body puts an end to lust; desire is destroyed either by the full enjoyment of the objects which it seeks, or by the excitement of other affections; ambition, when it has gained the honours which it wished for, loses its strength; likewise the other vices are unable to stand their ground and remain, but they are ended by the very enjoyment which they desire. Therefore they withdraw and return. But virtue is perpetual, without any intermission; nor can he who has once taken it up depart from it.
LACTANTIUS
The Sacred Writings of Lactantius
The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear