Vices Quotes - Page 10

Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.

Her virtue was that she said what she thought, her vice that what she thought didn't amount to much.

There are two kinds of discontented in this world, the discontented that works and the discontented that wrings its hands. The first gets what it wants and the second loses what it has. There is no cure for the first but success and there is no cure at all for the second. The very worst of my vices and bad habits will abate of themselves if they are brought to an accounting every day.

The impression that you are a demigod worried me. I wanted to be like an ordinary human being with virtues and vices.

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

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.

Friendship is given us by nature, not to favor vice, but to aid virtue.

You who make the laws, the vices and the virtues of the people will be your work.

The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.

We can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

Man is my brother, and I am nearer related to him through his vices than I am through his virtue.

The passions of the young are vices in the old.

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.

I forsee a marked deterioration in American musicand a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines

Mathematical studies may serve for a pleasant entertainment for those hours which young men are apt to throw away upon their vices.

I was utterly free of speculative prejudices. The bear side doesn't appeal to me any more than the bull side, or vice versa. My one steadfast prejudice is against being wrong.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference.

Noble passions are like vices: the more they are satisfied, the greater they grow, Mothers and gamblers are insatiable.

What has become clear is that Britain cannot trust the Conservatives to run the economy. Everyone knows that I'm all in favour of apprenticeships, but let me tell you this is no time for a novice.

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.

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.

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.

Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!