Vice Quotes

There are a set of religious, or rather moral writers, who teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery, in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true. ~ Tom Jones by Henry Fielding It is the unhappy lot of thoroughly weak men, that their very sympathies, affections, confidences—all the qualities which in better constituted minds are virtues—dwindle into foibles, or turn into downright vices. ~ Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens The vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination. ~ Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe No virtue could charm him, no vice shock him. He had about him a natural good manner, which seemed to qualify him for the highest circles, and yet he was never out of place in the lowest. ~ Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley's biography with that lightness and delicacy which the world demands--the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name. ~ Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions. ~ Hard Times by Charles Dickens "Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified." ~ Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare "Never," said my aunt, "be mean in anything; never be false; never be cruel. Avoid those three vices, Trot, and I can always be hopeful of you." ~ David Copperfield by Charles Dickens Flippancy, the most hopeless form of intellectual vice. ~ New Grub Street by George Gissing "Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!" ~ Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens