Vices Quotes

All institutions are prone to corruption and to the vices of their members.

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.

Unless the reformer can invent something which substitutes attractive virtues for attractive vices, he will fail.

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.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

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.

The word virtue is as useful to self-interest as the vices.

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.

Crimes sometimes shock us too much; vices almost always too little.

The virtues and vices are all put in motion by interest.

Let them show me a cottage where there are not the same vices of which they accuse the courts.

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.

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.

Most of the vices and mortal sins condemned today correspond to inclinations that were purely adaptive or at least harmless in primitive man.

Passions are vices or virtues to their highest powers.

How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.

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.

The word of God is full of sad and grave counsel, full of the knowledge of God, of examples of virtues, and of correction of vices, of the end of this life, and of the life to come.

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.

We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.

We can endure neither our vices nor the remedies for them.

Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.

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.

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.

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.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

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.

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.

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.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.