Quotes on Vices

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

What keeps us from abandoning ourselves entirely to one vice, often, is the fact that we have several.

The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you're a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won't be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.

We should every night call ourselves to an account: What infirmity have I mastered today? What passions opposed! What temptation resisted? What virtue acquired?

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

This nice and subtle happiness of reading, this joy not chilled by age, this polite and unpunished vice, this selfish, serene life-long intoxication.

The moral world has no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.

The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

This diary is my kief, hashish and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.

Style must be adapted to the woman and not vice versa. The same can be said of clothes.

You can’t say A is made of B or vice versa. All mass is interaction.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

Vice does not lose its character by becoming fashionable.

Every vice has its excuse ready.

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Heaven and hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad. But the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.