182 Quotes About Vice

A very special case. A few years more, and that pretty creature who you love too much, I think, will, without ever loving them, have known as many men as there are beads on her aunt's rosary. No happy medium! Either a nun or a monster! God's bosom or sensual passions! It would, perhaps, be better to put her in a convent, since we put hysterical women in the Saltpetriere! She does not know vice, she invents it!"That was ten years ago before the day our story begins and... Raoule was not a nun.

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

When they became wicked, they started to talk about brotherhood and humaneness and understood these ideas. When they became criminals, they invented justice and lay down complete codes of law to maintain it, and to secure these codes they erected a guillotine. They remembered only a tiny bit of what they had lost; they didn’t even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They even laughed at the possibility of this former happiness of theirs and called it a dream.

Why do men confuse innocence with ignorance?' I demanded and he wrinkled his brow.'Because someone who is ignorant of a vice is not tempted to indulge in it.''But may be more easily lured into it,' I said.

Parent may hinder their children's marriage; but children cannot interfere with the insane acts of their parents in their second childhood.

The one vice beyond redemption is to do bad things out of stupidity.

There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.

My hate is general, I detest all men;Some because they are wicked and do evil,Others because they tolerate the wicked,Refusing them the active vigorous scornWhich vice should stimulate in virtuous minds.

To hate is a virtue when you hate the vice.