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vice quotes

  • Content thyself to be obscurely good. When vice prevails, and impious men bear sway, The post of honour is a private station.

    -Joseph Addison
      Cato, act 4, sc.1, l.319^21.

  • Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

    - Francis,Viscount St Albans Bacon
      Essays, no.5,'Of  Adversity'.

  • Mutual forgiveness of each vice, Such are the Gates of Paradise.

    -William Blake
      The Gates of Paradise, prologue.

  • Grit riches and prosperitie Upfosteris vyce.

    -Thomas Brown
    c  Letters of Gold, l.131^2.

  • The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise isgone! it isgone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

    - Edmund Burke
      Reflections on the Revolution in France.

  •    Then let Ausonia, skilled in every art To soften manners, but corrupt the heart, Pour her exotic follies o'er the town, To sanctionVice, and hunt Decorum down.

    -Rochdale
      Engish Bards and Scotch Reviewers, l.618^21.

  •    Excellentioris person× semper casus in vitium, minoris lapsum, comparatione scandali multe longius antecedit. The scandal of an exalted person's fall into vice, when compared to the lapse of one lesser, always far exceeds it.

    - Malcolm   d.1093 Canmore
    c.1057  Quoted in  John Fordun's Chronicle of Scotland (c.1384), bk.5, ch.4.

  • Vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.

    - Daniel Defoe
      Moll Flanders.

  • Virtue's his path; but sometimes 'tis too narrow For his vast soul; and then he starts out wide, And bounds into a vice.

    -John Dryden
      Of  Antony.  All for Love, or The World Well Lost, act1.

  •    Alas, it doesindeed seema monstrousthing, but afterall, what is chaste in Constantinople may have the aspect of lewdness in Liverpool, and what in Liverpool may pass for virtueinConstantinopleisfrequently regardedasvice.

    - Ford Madox originally Ford Hermann Hueffer Ford
      Letter to  John Lane,17 Dec.

  • Extremism in the defence of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

    - Barry M(orris) Goldwater
      Speech to the Republican convention,16  Jul.

  • Mr Kemblesacrificestoomuchto decorum.He ischiefly afraid of being contaminated by too close an identity with the character herepresents.This isthegreatest vice in an actor, who ought never to bilk his part.

    -William Hazlitt
      Of  John Philip Kemble's performance as Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's  A New Way to Pay Old Debts. In The Examiner, 5 May.

  • Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it.

    - Ernest Millar Hemingway
      Interview in the Paris Review, Spring.

  • But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses, let us count our spoons.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Remark,14  Jul. Quoted in  James Boswell The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), vol.1.

  • It is the only sensual pleasure without vice.

    - Samuel known as Dr Johnson Johnson
      Of music. Quoted in Sir John Hawkins Johnsoniana (1787).

  • I see compassion may become a justice, though it be a weakness, I confess, and nearer a vice than a virtue.

    - Ben Jonson
      Bartholomew Fair, act 4, sc.2.

  • L'hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend a'   la vertu. Hypocrisy is a tribute which vice pays to virtue.

    - Fran c° ois, 6th Duc de La Rochefoucauld
      Maximes, no.218.

  • My Darling, prickly hedgehog of the heart, chocolates, cherries, hairshirts, pinks and glass when we joined in the sublime blindness of courtship loving lost all its vice with half its virtue.

    - RobertTraill Spence,Jr Lowell
      'NewYear's Eve'.

  • All the immediate checks to populationseem to be resolvable into moral restraint, vice and misery.

    -Thomas Robert Malthus
      An Essay on the Principle of Population.

  • The root of Evil, Avarice That damn'd ill-natur'd, baneful Vice, Was Slave to Prodigality, That noble Sin; whilst Luxury Employed a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more; Envy itself, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made That very Wheel that turned theTrade.

    - Bernard Mandeville
      The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (2nd edn.).

  • Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any mancanpursue; it needs anunceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit.It cannot, like adulteryor gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole- time job.

    -W(illiam) Somerset Maugham
      Cakes and  Ale, ch.1.

  • That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

    -John Milton
      Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

  • Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout intotheregions of sinand falsity thanby reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

    -John Milton
      Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

  • J'aime mieux un vice commode Qu'une fatigante vertu. I prefer easygoing vice to tiresome virtue.

    -Jean Baptiste Poquelin Molie'  re
      Amphitryon, act1, sc.4.

  • Il n'ya qu'un seul vice dont on ne voie personne se vanter, c'est l'ingratitude. There is only one vice of which no one boastsingratitude. 611

    - Ge  rard de pseudonym of  Ge  rard Labrunie Nerval
      Fragments,'Paradoxe et ve  rite ' .

  • Punctuality is the vice of virtuous women.

    -John pseudonym of  John Patrick Goggan Patrick
      Line delivered by CliftonWebb in Three Coins in the Fountain.

  • Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

    - Alexander Pope
      An Essay on Man, epistle 2, l.217^19.

  • La cruaute  , bien loin d'e"  tre un vice, est le premier sentiment qu'imprime en nous la nature; l'enfant brise son hochet, mord le te  ton de sa nourrice, e  trangle son oiseau, bien avant que d'avoir l'a"  ge de raison. Far from being a vice, cruelty is the primary feeling that nature imprints in us. The infant breaks its rattle, bites its nurse's nipple, and strangles a bird, well before reaching the age of reason.

    - Donatien Alphonse Fran c° ois, Marquis de Sade
      La Philosophie dans le boudoir.

  • What a pity it is we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!

    - Rev Sydney Smith
    Quoted in H PearsonThe Smith of Smiths, (1934), ch.10.

  • For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right,

    - Edmund Spenser
      The Faerie Queen, bk.5, proem, stanza 4.

  • It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

    -William Graham Sumner
      'Sociology', collected in War and Other Essays (1911).

  • Change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice.

    - Algernon Charles Swinburne
      Poems and Ballads,'Dolores', stanza 9.

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

    -Tennyson
      Maud, pt.1, sect.4, stanza 7, l.139.

  • The vice of meanness, condemned in every other country, is in Scotland translated into a virtue called 'thrift'.

    - David Thomson
      Nairn in Darkness and Light.

  • So writing ismy sole remaining vice.It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable.

    -John Hoyer Updike
      Self-Consciousness,VI.'On Being A Self Forever'.

  • Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not being vice.

    - Horace, 4th Earl of Orford Walpole
    Quoted in L Kronenberger The Extraordinary MrWilkes (1973).

  • In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be classics, now it's lyric verse.

    - Evelyn Arthur StJohn Waugh
      The Loved One, ch.9.

Webster's New World Dictionary of Quotations Copyright © 2010 by Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Published by Wiley, Hoboken, NJ. Used by arrangement with John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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