Quotes on Vices

I cannot love anyone if I hate myself. That is the reason why we feel so extremely uncomfortable in the presence of people who are noted for their special virtuousness, for they radiate an atmosphere of the torture they inflict on themselves. That is not a virtue but a vice.

The main vice of capitalism is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.

I have not so great a struggle with my vices, great and numerous as they are, as I have with my impatience. My efforts are not absolutely useless; yet I have never been able to conquer this ferocious wild beast.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.

Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness

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

Are you still to learn that the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue?

.. that which renders morality an active principle and constitutes virtue our happiness, and vice our misery: it is probable, I say, that this final sentence depends on some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species.

It came to me…that I didn’t want to be anywhere else in the world at that moment, that what I was feeling at that moment justified all I had been through, because all I had been through was my being there. I was experiencing…a new self-acceptance, a sense that I had to be this mind and this body, its vices and its virtues, and that I had no other chance or choice.

If you would reform the world from its errors and vices, begin by enlisting the mothers.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke strops our vice.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty.

No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has ever experienced.

Labor rids us of three great evils; tediousness, vice, and poverty.

The world has lost the power to blush over its vice; the Church has lost her power to weep over it.

Pitching always beats batting — and vice-versa.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms human coexistence, and vice versa. It becomes more and more evident that there is an inseparable link between peace with creation and peace among men.

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.