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It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster.
Author:
Rebecca West
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All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.
Author:
Morris West
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The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
Author:
Elizabeth Taylor
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He who busies himself with things other than improvement of his own self becomes perplexed in darkness and entangled in ruin. His evil spirits immerse him deep in vices and make his bad actions seem handsome.
Author:
Ali Talib
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Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.
Author:
Percy Shelley
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Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.
Author:
Merle Shain
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We should every night call ourselves to an account: what infirmity have I mastered today? what passions opposed? what temptation resisted? what virtue acquired? Our vices will abate of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.
Author:
Lucius Seneca
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Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.
Author:
Walter Scott
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The virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.
Author:
Herbert Samuel
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Nature, who for the perfect maintenance of the laws of her general equilibrium, has sometimes need of vices and sometimes of virtues, inspires now this impulse, now that one, in accordance with what she requires.
Author:
Marquis Sade
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Man's natural character is to imitate; that of the sensitive man is to resemble as closely as possible the person whom he loves. It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.
Author:
Marquis Sade
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Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
Author:
Theodore Roosevelt
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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.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.
Author:
Francois Rochefoucauld
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Vices are often habits rather than passions.
Author:
Antoine Rivarol
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A few vices are sufficient to darken many virtues.
Author:
Plutarch
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What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.
Author:
William Paley
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As the purpose of comedy is to correct the vices of men, I see no reason why anyone should be exempt.
Author:
Moliere
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Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.
Author:
Konrad Lorenz
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We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.
Author:
Titus Livius
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Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.
Author:
Walter Lippmann
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It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Author:
Abraham Lincoln
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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?
Author:
Peter Kropotkin
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Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.
Author:
Juvenal
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The passions of the young are vices in the old.
Author:
Joseph Joubert
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Coercion may prevent many transgressions; but it robs even actions which are legal of a part of their beauty. Freedom may lead to many transgressions, but it lends even to vices a less ignoble form.
Author:
Wilhelm Humboldt
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A portion of mankind take pride in their vices and pursue their purpose; many more waver between doing what is right and complying with what is wrong.
Author:
Horace
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Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.
Author:
Augustus Hare
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Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.
Author:
Johann Goethe
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Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
Author:
R. Fuller
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Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.
Author:
Benjamin Franklin
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The accumulation of numbers always augments in some measure moral corruptions, and the consequences to health of the various vices incident thereto, are well known.
Author:
William Falconer
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We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.
Author:
Denis Diderot
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Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!
Author:
Charles Dickens
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The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.
Author:
Rene Descartes
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For me, I go in and play a few Christian songs for an audience, and now I have people come up and not tell me I'm great, but tell me that my music is helping save their lives, helping them in the Lord, and helping them end their vices.
Author:
Rick Derringer
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So much of our lives is given over to the consideration of our imperfections that there is no time to improve our imaginary virtues. The truth is we only perfect our vices, and man is a worse creature when he dies than he was when he was born.
Author:
Edward Dahlberg
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Although all the good arts serve to draw man's mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.
Author:
Nicolaus Copernicus
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No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.
Author:
Charles Colton
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How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.
Author:
Samuel Coleridge
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He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.
Author:
Winston Churchill
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Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.
Author:
Lord Chesterfield
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Evil borders upon good, and vices are confounded with virtues; as the report of good qualities is delightful to a well-disposed mind, so the relation of the contrary should not be offensive.
Author:
Giraldus Cambrensis
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Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
Author:
Samuel Butler
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As the most extravagant errors were received among the established articles of their faith, so the most infamous vices obtained in their practice, and were indulged not only with impunity, but authorized by the sanction of their laws.
Author:
David Brainerd
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We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
Author:
Daniel Boorstin
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Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.
Author:
Napoleon Bonaparte
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I was so happy when they cast me in Chocolat, because it's one of my vices.
Author:
Juliette Binoche
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Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.
Author:
Tallulah Bankhead
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It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.
Author:
Walter Bagehot
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An element of exaggeration clings to the popular judgment: great vices are made greater, great virtues greater also; interesting incidents are made more interesting, softer legends more soft.
Author:
Walter Bagehot
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We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.
Author:
Saint Augustine
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We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.
Author:
Saint Augustine
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Often, city fathers blamed prostitutes for the disease, and some threatened to brand their cheeks with hot iron if they did not desist from their vices.
Author:
Peter Allen
