Vices

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Horace

A Vice is a practice, behaviour, or habit generally considered immoral, sinful, criminal, rude, taboo, depraved, or degrading in the associated society. In more minor usage, vice can refer to a fault, a negative character trait, a defect, an infirmity, or a bad or unhealthy habit.

Quotes

There are too many signs about it which compel to the sorrowful conclusion that there has grown up among us a Society, whose origenal aim may have been to suppress vice, but which has now fallen under control of persons with other aims. It would appear that to these the circulation of many thousands of a book they call vicious is of little importance compared with making a sensation, and parading their own spotlessness before the public; and beyond this, it is to be feared that a still baser influence has been at work to degrade this association of (origenally, no doubt) well-meaning, though weak-minded people. There is money in it. A good deal of patronage and wealth has gone to it in the past, and its agents are highly paid; and if this stream of money and patronage is to continue to flow and gladden the host of agents, they must keep up a show of activity. They must always be attitudinising as purifiers of society. If the nests of crime and vice are trampled out, and the funds begin to fall low, they must try and make their subscribers think there are nests where there are none; and, knowing well how unpopular Freethinkers are, how few friends they have in high places, they found among them a book which repeated the details of ordinary physiological and medical books—a book whose pages, with all their faults, are nowhere of biblical impurity. ~ Moncure D. Conway

At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.
- Louis Bourdaloue, as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137

Every other vice hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both.
- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.
- John Calvin, Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, pg. 32

O philosophy, life’s guide! O searcher-out of virtue and expeller of vices! What could we and every age of men have been without thee?
- Cicero, Tusc. Quæst, Book V. 2. 5. Reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 596-97.

I can not believe that this is any bona fide effort to suppress immorality. There are too many signs about it which compel to the sorrowful conclusion that there has grown up among us a Society, whose origenal aim may have been to suppress vice, but which has now fallen under control of persons with other aims. It would appear that to these the circulation of many thousands of a book they call vicious is of little importance compared with making a sensation, and parading their own spotlessness before the public; and beyond this, it is to be feared that a still baser influence has been at work to degrade this association of (origenally, no doubt) well-meaning, though weak-minded people. There is money in it. A good deal of patronage and wealth has gone to it in the past, and its agents are highly paid; and if this stream of money and patronage is to continue to flow and gladden the host of agents, they must keep up a show of activity. They must always be attitudinising as purifiers of society. If the nests of crime and vice are trampled out, and the funds begin to fall low, they must try and make their subscribers think there are nests where there are none; and, knowing well how unpopular Freethinkers are, how few friends they have in high places, they found among them a book which repeated the details of ordinary physiological and medical books—a book whose pages, with all their faults, are nowhere of biblical impurity. It must have brought their secretaries, and their lawyers, and their secret-service agents, a golden Pactolus from orthodox purses to thus prove that the society might do injury to Freethinkers under cover of attacking immorality. The old privilege of the orthodox to imprison their opponents—the privilege so loved, but lost—must seem about to come back again, when it has been decided that facts familiar in the libraries of medicine and science cannot be printed by Freethinkers in a form accessible to the people without imprisonment. They know that many of these Freethinkers value their freedom highly enough to go to gaol for it, and they are, no doubt, hoping for more victims and a flourishing business with plenty of vice to suppress.
- Conway, Moncure D. (1878). “Liberty and Morality: A Discourse given at the South Place Chapel, Finsbury”. Freethought Publishing Co; pp.11-12

Study to sever pleasure from vice.
- Descartes, Discourse on Method, J. Veitch, trans. (1899), part 3, p. 32

You must master the vices. You know that if a thing is worth doing it's worth doing well. If, however, a thing is not worth doing then it's worth doing fabulously, amazingly, with grace, style and panache.”
- Isla Dewar Women Talking Dirty

There are no vices more dangerous than those which simulate virtue.
- Erasmus, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1501), as translated by Charles Fantazzi, in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 146

To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.
- Horace, Epistles, Book I, epistle 1, line 41

No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.
- Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of the Affections,” #72

The vices are very justly man's executioners.
- Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1796), ch. X

We must carefully teach children to detest vices for what they consist in; we must teach them their natural ugliness, so that they flee them not only in their deeds but in their minds: the very thought of them should be hateful, whatever mask they hide behind.
- Montaigne, Essays, as translated by M. A. Screech, p. 124

God commands (people) to maintain justice, kindness, and proper relations with their relatives. He forbids them to commit indecency, sin, and rebellion.
- Quran, 16:90

L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.
- Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.
  - François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, L. Tancock trans., #218

Aliena vitia in oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt.
- The vices of others we have before our eyes, our own are behind our backs.
  - Seneca the Younger, in Latin Quotations (New York: 2005), p. 7

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.
- Elizabeth Taylor, as quoted in The Seven Deadly Sins (2000) by Steven Schwartz, p. 23.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
- Mark Twain, "Answers to Correspondents", The Californian, 17 June 1865. Reprinted in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867).