Virtues And Vices Quotes

NATURE'S LAWS
There are virtues and vices in every person. It's your choice what you want to see. The same will multiply in your life a thousandfold. ~ Sirshree

Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation ... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous. ~ Aristotle.

ANGELO

From thee, even from thy virtue!
What's this, what's this? Is this her fault or mine?
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?
Ha!
Not she: nor doth she tempt: but it is I
That, lying by the violet in the sun,
Do as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be
That modesty may more betray our sense
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground enough,
Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary
And pitch our evils there? O, fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? O, let her brother live!
Thieves for their robbery have authority
When judges steal themselves. What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again,
And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,
With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous
Is that temptation that doth goad us on
To sin in loving virtue: never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite. Even till now,
When men were fond, I smiled and wonder'd how.

-- Measure for Measure, II, ii ~ William Shakespeare

Unless we suppress our conscience, we naturally know basic moral truths. General virtues and vices, Thomas Reid wrote, "must appear self-evident to every man who has a conscience, and has taken the pains to exercise this natural power of his mind" ("Of Morals"). ~ Anonymous

High fortune makes both our virtues and vices stand out as objects that are brought clearly to view by the light. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Try, start always at home. This is my encouragement to all writers, start at home. All virtues and vices begin at home, and then spread abroad. ~ Maya Angelou

For the Supernatural, entering a human soul, opens to it new possibilities both of good and evil. From that point the road branches: one way to sanctity, love humility, the other to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, persecuting zeal. And no way back to the mere humdrum virtues and vices of the unawakened soul. ~ C.S. Lewis

Literature, in fact, had been concerned with virtues and vices of a perfectly healthy sort, the regular functioning of brains of a normal conformation, the practical reality of current ideas, with never a thought for morbid depravities and other-worldly aspirations; in short, the discoveries of these anaylists of human nature stopped short at the speculations good or bad, classified by the church; their efforts amounted to no more than the humdrum researches of a botanist who watches closely the expected development of ordinary flora planted in common or garden soil. ~ Joris-Karl Huysmans

We all have vices, visible and invisible. Some we deliberately keep secret. Others we don't even realize or we refuse to admit we have ... Vices can be lots of fun, or they can turn your life into a living hell. Accept them for what they are, just another aspect of the mind's creation, and you can enjoy them - if you choose - without being broken by them.
- Zeena Schreck for VICE Magazine ~ Zeena Schreck

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

With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes. ~ Peter Heather

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not see ~ G.K. Chesterton

To conquer your nature is better than to conquer the whole world. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. ~ Victor Hugo

Among the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years. ~ William Golding

So what the hell's wrong with me?" Nyx eased off the marble slab.
"Besides your deviant moral flexibility and severe phobia of emotional commitment?" Yahfia asked.
"I consider those virtues," Nyx said. ~ Kameron Hurley

Fortune makes our virtues and vices visible, just as light does the objects of sight. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays as important a part as it once did in setting moral standards and transmitting values ... History with a capital H is being called in to fill the void. It restores a sense not necessarily of a divine being but of something above and beyond human beings. It is our authority: it can vindicate us and judge us, and damn those who oppose us. ~ Margaret MacMillan

The greatest victories one ever wins over are over his vices. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices. ~ Nelson Mandela

The modern world has forgotten the necessity of encouraging men to be better. They speak of sick men or healthy men, of interesting people or uninteresting people; they never, or seldom, indicate that there is and must be an interior and spiritual improvement in man before any of the glowing coals of humanity can be reached. They have cultivated everything but the goodness of man. The result of such shallowness is everywhere apparent. ~ Francis Beauchesne Thornton

It takes a man of unusual character to openly confront his own shortcomings. It's so much more convenient to blame others. ~ Raymond E. Feist

We should be carefree with our bodies and prudish with our brains, not the contrary. How virtuous we are with our flesh, and yet the first foul thought that comes our way is invited to the depths of our soul. ~ Anthony Marais

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. ~ Francois De La Rochefoucauld

Virtue is attended by more peace of mind than vice, and meets with a more favourable reception from the world. I am sensible, that, according to the past experience of mankind, friendship is the chief joy of human life and moderation the only source of tranquillity and happiness. ~ David Hume

We have to realize that treating animals well is in our best interests, too. Cruelty is indivisible; when you are cruel to an animal, you are training yourself to be cruel to people, too (and vice versa). ~ Jonathan Balcombe

When you undervalue who you are, the world will undervalue what you do and vice versa. ~ Suze Orman

What are you going to do?' whispered Temple.
'There was a time I'd have gone charging over there without a thought for the costs and got bloody.' Lamb lifted the glass and looked at it for a moment. 'But my father always said patience is the king of virtues. A man has to be realistic. Has to be.'
'So what are you going to do?'
'Wait. Think. Prepare.' Lamb swallowed the last measure and bared his teeth at the glass. 'Then get bloody. ~ Joe Abercrombie

Travel opens different eyes to different things, shows things we've never seen before, shows the world from entirely different angles. That's the power of drawing and the power of travel. They both make the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa. They show what we all have in common and what we may have missed thanks to preconceptions that may have marred our vision. ~ Danny Gregory

Eggs is great at leading the Boxtrolls, and that's probably my favorite trait of his. He is a Boxtroll, but he hasn't lost all of his human virtues. He can get out of his box, and he can fight back, which the Boxtrolls can't. ~ Isaac Hempstead-Wright

Virtue and vice are both prophets; the first, of certain good; the second, of pain or else of penitence. ~ Ralph Venning

You may wear your virtues as a crown,
As you walk through life serenely,
And grace your simple rustic gown
With a beauty more than queenly.
Though only one for you shall care,
One only speak your praises;
And you never wear in your shining hair,
A richer flower than daisies. ~ Phoebe Cary

Our most valuable teachers are our enemies.While our friends can help us in many ways, only our enemies can provide us with the challenge we need to develop tolerance, patience, and compassionthree virtues essential for building character, developing peace of mind, and bringing us true happiness. ~ Dalai Lama

Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. ~ Thomas Paine

Don't wait for miracles but believe and be so strong enough in invisible virtues like faithfulness. ~ Sunday Adelaja

If the children are untaught, their ignorance and vices will in future life cost us much dearer in their consequences than it would have done in their correction by a good education. ~ Thomas Jefferson

There was something stubborn in me that didn't want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he'd be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be. Of course, what I'd forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product. ~ Edmund White

Listen, Kafka. What you're experiencing now is the motif of many Greek tragedies. Man doesn't choose fate. Fate chooses man. That's the basic worldview of Greek drama. And the sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. Sophocles' Oedipus Rex being a great example. Oedipus is drawn into tragedy not because of laziness or stupidity, but because of his courage and honesty. So an inevitable irony results. ~ Haruki Murakami

The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice. ~ Samuel Smiles

Love is a virtue; it grows stronger and purer and less selfish by applying it to what it loathes; but theft is a vice involving the slave-idea that one's neighbor is superior to oneself. ~ Aleister Crowley

Some of 'em [virtues] like extinct volcanoes,
with a strong memory or fire and brimstone. ~ Douglas William Jerrold

A man's shortcomings are taken from his epoch; his virtues and greatness belong to himself. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Our cares are the mothers, not only of our charities And virtues, but of our best joys and most cheering and enduring pleasures. ~ William Gilmore Simms

We, with our propensity for murder, torture, slavery, rape, cannibalism, pillage, advertising jingles, shag carpets, and golf, how could we be seriously considered as the perfection of a four-billion-year-old grandiose experiment? perhaps as a race, we have evolved as far as we are capable, yet that by no means suggests that evolution has called it quits. in all likelihood, it has something beyond human on the drawing board. we tend to refer to our most barbaric and crapulous behavior as "inhuman," whereas, in point of fact, it is exactly human, definitively and quintessentially human, since no other creature habitually indulges in comparable atrocities. this negates neither our occasional virtues nor our aesthetic triumphs, but if a being at least a little bit more than human is not waiting around the bend of time then evolution has suffered a premature ejaculation. ~ Tom Robbins

There is nothing that does not have something perfect in it; and it is the happiness of good taste to be able to find this perfection in all things. But there is a natural malignity that often discovers a vice in the midst of several virtues, in order to reveal and proclaim the discovery to all the world - a quality that is more the mark of a naturally evil temperament than a superior sense of discrimination. And it is truly an evil lot, to pass one's life always feeding off the imperfections of others. ~ Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant. ~ Albert Camus

Mechanized warfare still left room for human qualities to play an important part in the issue. 'Automatic warfare' cancels them out, except in a passive form. Archidamus is at last being justified. Courage, skill and patriotism become shrinking assets. The most virile nation might not be able to withstand another, inferior to it in all natural qualities, if the latter had some decisively superior technical appliance.
(...)The advent of 'automatic warfare' should make plain the absurdity of warfare as a means of deciding nations' claims to superiority. It blows away romantic vapourings about the heroic virtues of war, utilized by aggressive and ambitious leaders to generate a military spirit among their people. They can no longer claim that war is any test of a people's fitness, or even of its national strength. Science has undermined the foundations of nationalism, at the very time when the spirit of nationalism is most rampant. ~ B.H. Liddell Hart

The yearning after equality [in economic outcome] is the offspring of envy and covetousness, and there is no possible plan for satisfying that yearning which can do aught else than rob A to give to B; consequently all such plans nourish some of the meanest vices of human nature, waste capital, and overthrow civilization. ~ William Graham Sumner

Absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullness of it and the pomposities of it. ~ Samuel Beckett

He parked his car carefully, made sure he'd set all the locks and the alarm. On the steps he kept looking behind him, snapping glances into shadows like he expected this to be a set-up with my gang waiting to roll him. Nervous. But I got this feeling the possibility of danger was all part of it for him. What he wanted was something with an edge to it, something stamped as unmistakable bad.

Welcome to the club, dude. ~ Matthew Stokoe

The dark picture which St. Paul, in addressing the Romans, draws of the heathenism of his day, is fully sustained by Seneca, Tacitus, Juvenal, Persius, and other heathen writers of that age, and shows the absolute need of redemption. "The world," says Seneca, in a famous passage, "is full of crimes and vices. More are committed than can be cured by force. There is an immense struggle for iniquity. Crimes are no longer bidden, but open before the eyes. Innocence is not only rare, but nowhere."83 ~ Philip Schaff

It's entirely to do with personality, I think. There are good directors who talk a lot, bad directors who talk a lot, and good directors who don't say much and vice-versa. It just depends on whether people respond to that personality and whether people have a willingness to do something for them. ~ Colin Firth

Let Christ turn your natural optimism into Christian hope, your energy into moral virtue, your good will into genuine self-sacrificin g love! This is the path you are called to take. This is the path to overcoming all that threatens hope, virtue and love in your lives and in your culture. In this way your youth will be a gift to Jesus and to the world. ~ Pope Francis

Whatever causes night in our souls may leave stars. Cimourdain was full of virtues and truth, but they shine out of a dark background. ~ Victor Hugo

And what is the use of knowing many things if, when you have learned the dimensions of heaven and earth, the measure of the seas, the courses of stars, the virtues of plants and stones, the secrets of nature, you still don't know yourself? ~ Francesco Petrarca

And then there are those you stop counting the years with because they are here to stay.
They are here. And they aren't going anywhere.
Nothing will make them flinch.
Nothing will make them think twice.
They know you at your worst,
the worst you didn't even know you had.
They know the sound of your mood swings, the color of your anger, how you curse when you curse, how you shout when you throw a tantrum. They know when you're avoiding a subject. They know when you're lying. They know when you're jealous. They know your vices by heart and they celebrate them. They celebrate you-- vices included.
They know your lost dreams and how life fucked you over. They know the battles you lost. And they think your fabulous when you think you're just an unlucky mediocre person who once thought will make it big in life.
They know the last time you were happy. They see the unspoken sadness in your eyes. They know the words behind your silence. They know the photographs playing in your mind when you're looking afar.
They know YOU, the naked YOU, the raw YOU, not the embellished YOU people see, not the YOU that will be read in biographies or in elegies once you're dead, not the YOU that introduces you to others.
They love you from the bottom of their heart. They are your family regardless of their blood. They are your squad. They are your people.
And no matter how many times you make them open the door, they can't walk out. They just can't ~ Malak El Halabi

That night, before going to bed, he went on to say, 'Never be afraid of thieves and murderers. They represent the dangers without, which are not worth worrying about. Be afraid of ourselves. Prejudices are the real thieves, vices are the murderers. The greatest dangers are within us. Who cares who threatens our heads or our purses! Let's think only of what threatens our souls. ~ Victor Hugo

Virtues neglected then, adored become, And graces slighted, blossom on the tomb. ~ George Crabbe

Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. ~ Hippolyte Taine

In the present day, when popular literature is running into the low levels of life, and luxuriating on the vices and follies of mankind; and when the universal pursuit of gain is trampling down the early growth of poetic feeling, and wearing out the verdure of the soul, I question whether it would not be of service for the reader occasionally to turn to these records of prouder times and loftier modes of thinking; and to steep himself to the very lips in old Spanish romance. ~ Washington Irving

Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful- horrible to anticipate, horrible to feel, horrible to remember; hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. And hatred is also a great anodyne for shame. ~ C.S. Lewis

Ninety per cent of the world's woe comes from people not knowing themselves, their abilities, their frailties, and even their real virtues. Most of us go almost all the way through life as complete strangers to ourselves
so how can we know anyone else? ~ Sydney J. Harris

I know no man who feels deeper disgust than I do at the ambition, avarice, and profligacy of the priesthood, as well because every one of these vices is odious in itself, as because each of them separately and all of them together are utterly abhorrent in men making profession of a life dedicated to God. ~ Francesco Guicciardini

Integrity is an eternal virtue we should focus our mind on and not miracles ~ Sunday Adelaja

The birth of the new constitutes a crisis, and its mastery calls for a crude and simple cast of mind
the mind of a fighter
in which the virtues of tribal cohesion and fierceness and infantile credulity and malleability are paramount. Thus every new beginning recapitulates in some degree man's first beginning. ~ Eric Hoffer

Some seek only the appearance of justice and virtues. Some seek real justice and virtues. Some others are too lazy to search at all. ~ Klaudio Marashi

First, you can develop resilience. Anyone can do it. No one can do it for you. You and you alone have to do the work. Second, you can develop resilience. It's possible to build virtues. It's possible to change your character. It's possible, therefore, to change the direction of your life. Third, you can develop resilience. Resilience cannot be purchased or given to you; you have to do the hard work of building excellence in your life. ~ Eric Greitens

Rationality is man's basic virtue, the source of all his other virtues. Man's basic vice, the source of all evils, is the act of unfocussing his mind, the suspension of his conciousness, which is not blindness, but the refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know. Irrationality is the rejection of man's means of survival and therefore, a commitment to a course of blind destruction; that is anti-mind, anti-life. ~ Ayn Rand

All good virtues and goodness itself will gradually find their true home in the heart in which love dwells, and all other qualities will wither and die ~ Harold Klemp