Quotes on Vices

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.

There are no infidels anywhere but on earth: there are none in heaven, and there are none in hell. Atheism is a strange thing. Even the devils never fell into that vice, for the devils believe and tremble. And there are some of the devil's children that have gone beyond their father in sin, but how will it look when they are for ever lost?

Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.

Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.

It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verifications, for nearly every theory-if we look for confirmations. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions... A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific. Irrefutability is not a virtue of a theory (as people often think) but a vice. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or refute it.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.

No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Vice is perhaps a desire to learn everything.

HERMIT, n. A person whose vices and follies are not sociable.

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.

It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

Those who believe that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state.

There is no vice so simple but assumes some mark of virtue on his outward parts.