1.
Sir John Vanbrugh -
“Virtue is its own reward. There's a pleasure in doing good which sufficiently pays itself.”
2.
Henry David Thoreau -
“We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice.”
3.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca -
“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 abort of themselves if they be brought every day to the shrift.”
4.
Alexander Pope -
“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet seen to oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
5.
John Milton -
“He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather: that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.”
6.
Abraham Lincoln -
“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
7.
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld -
“One is never so happy or so unhappy as one thinks.”
8.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
“The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.”
9.
Ralph Waldo Emerson -
“Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.”
10.
John Dryden -
“Ill habits gather by unseen degrees,— As brooks make rivers, rivers run to seas.”
11.
Quentin Crisp -
“Vice is its own reward.”
12.
Samuel Butler, the Younger -
“It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.”
13.
John Ray -
“Many without punishment, but none without sin.”
14.
Alexander Pope -
“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
15.
Abraham Lincoln -
“It has ever been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”
16.
François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld -
“The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, As poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects, arranges, and uses them Beneficially against the ills of life.”
17.
Decimus Junius Juvenalis Juvenal -
“No one ever reached the worst of a vice at one leap.”
18.
Benjamin Franklin -
“What maintains one vice would bring up two children.”
19.
Sir Winston Churchill -
“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”
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