Pastoral Resources

Vices are often habits rather than passions.

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

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

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

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

Our virtues are often, in reality, no better than vices disguised.

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.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

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.

Man's natural character is to imitate; that of the sensitive man is to resemble as closely as possible the person whom he loves. It is only by imitating the vices of others that I have earned my misfortunes.

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 virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.

Of all vices, drinking is the most incompatible with greatness.

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.

Through tattered clothes, small vices do appear. Robes and furred gowns hide all.

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.

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.

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

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