"Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion in vice."
Vices quotes
Vices
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Vices quotes (page 4 of 53)
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"When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them."
"Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it."
"If it is true that cowardice is the most grave vice, then the dog, at least, is not guilty of it."
"Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!"
"Some years ago one oil company bought a fertilizer company, and every other major oil company practically ran out and bought a fertilizer company. And there was no more damned reason for all these oil companies to buy fertilizer companies, but they didn't know exactly what to do, and if Exxon was doing it, it was good enough for Mobil and vice versa."
"Economists get very uncomfortable when you talk about virtue and vice. It doesn't lend itself to a lot of columns with numbers. But I would argue that there are big virtue effects in economics. I would say that the spreading of double-entry bookkeeping by the Monk, Fra Luce de Pacioli, was a big virtue effect in economics. It made business more controllable, and it made it more honest."
"Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice."
"We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot."
"The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds."
"It is of great importance to set a resolution, not to be shaken, never to tell an untruth. There is no vice so mean, so pitiful, so contemptible; and he who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time, till at length it becomes habitual."
"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness."
"Prosperity discovers vice, adversity discovers virtue."
"The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices."
"Friendship is given us by nature, not to favor vice, but to aid virtue."
"Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell."
"We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is."
"The passions of the young are vices in the old."
"Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies."
"Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable."