A Quote by Thornton Wilder

If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

Thornton Wilder

Quote Topics

About Danger Great His Making Man Spectacle Vices Virtues

Quote Author

Thornton Wilder
American - Novelist
April 17, 1897 - December 7, 1975

His vices were the vices of his time and culture, but his virtues transcended the milieu of his life.

Orson Scott Card

The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Of all vices take heed of drunkenness; other vices are but fruits of disordered affections--this disorders, nay, banishes reason; other vices but impair the soul--this demolishes her two chief faculties, the understanding and the will; other vices make their own way--this makes way for all vices; he that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

Francis Quarles

Pride is the king of vices...it is the first of the pallbearers of the soul...other vices destroy only their opposite virtues, as wantonness destroys chastity; greed destroys temperance; anger destroys gentleness; but pride destroys all virtues.

Fulton J. Sheen

Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.

Richard Whately

The weak-minded man is the slave of his vices and the dupe of his virtues.

Jean Antoine Petit-Senn

I do not love a man, except I hate his vices, because those vices are the enemies, and the destruction of that friend whom I love.

John Donne

The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

No distinction is 'tween man and man, But as his virtues add to him a glory Or vices cloud him.

William Habington

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

George Bernard Shaw

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.

Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Young men make wars, and the virtues of war are the virtues of young men: courage, and hope for the future. Then old men make the peace, and the vices of peace are the vices of old men: mistrust and caution.