182 Quotes About Vice

If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined.

Weakness ever sympathizes with vice, because vice is a weakness which assumes the mask of strength. Madness holds reason in horror, and on all subjects it delights in the exaggerations of falsehood. The cause of all bewitchments, the poison of all philtres, the power of all sorcerers are there.

For what is the self-complacent man but a slave to his own self-praise.

Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...

In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties.

What a difference! Under the esthetic sky, everything is buoyant, beautiful, transient! when ethics arrives on the scene, everything becomes harsh, angular and infinitely boring

Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface.

Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.

Of course, as everyone knows, neither my five books nor any five hundred books are sufficient to silence and pertinacity. It is the glory of vain men never to yield to the truth.