More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.
--
The Analysis of the Hunting Field (1846) ch. 1Robert Smith Surtees
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Not to know vice at all, and keep true state,
Is virtue, and not fate:
Next to that virtue is to know vice well,
And her black spite expel.Ben Jonson
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.
Samuel (novelist Butler
Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate their virtue or vice only by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath every moment.
There will be an agreement in whatever variety of actions, so they be each honest and natural in their hour. For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency.Ralph Waldo Emerson
There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.
Anthony Daniels
Your favourite virtue ... Simplicity
Your favourite virtue in man ... Strength
Your favourite virtue in woman ... Weakness
Your chief characteristic ... Singleness of purpose
Your idea of happiness ... To fight
Your idea of misery ... Submission
The vice you excuse most ... Gullibility
The vice you detest most ... Servility
Your aversion ... Martin Tupper
Favourite occupation ... Book-worming
Favourite poet ... Shakespeare, Aeschylus, Goethe
Favourite prose-writer ... Diderot
Favourite hero ... Spartacus, Kepler
Favourite heroine ... Gretchen [Heroine of Goethe's Faust]
Favourite flower ... Daphne
Favourite colour ... Red
Favourite name ... Laura, Jenny
Favourite dish ... Fish
Favourite maxim ... Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]
Favourite motto ... De omnibus dubitandum [Everything must be doubted].Karl Marx
Surtees, Robert Smith
Susskind, Leonard
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