A Quote by Brendan Behan
A man is fortunate if he encounters living examples of vice, as well as of virtue, to inspire him.
Related Quotes
Without Jesus Christ man must be in vice and misery with Jesus Christ man is free from vice and misery in Him is all our virtue and all our happiness. Apart from Him there is but vice, misery, darkness, death, despair.
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
There is that in the soul of man which must respond to the highest in virtue. It may not respond at once. Human nature can easily be over-faced by examples too remote and austere. Moreover, human nature can easily deny God because the whole race has long been in rebellion against Him. Yet there is that in human nature which calls out to the supreme examples of virtue: owns, as it were, the intention of God who made it, and feels the unmistakable homesickness of the soul.
Change a virtue in its circumstances find it becomes a vice; change a vice in its circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of a man is found concealed far below these moral badges.
[The] operation of the wisest laws is imperfect and precarious. They seldom inspire virtue, they cannot always restrain vice.
Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.
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.
Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.
We feel something like respect for consistency even in error. We lament the virtue that is debauched into a vice; but the vice that affects a virtue becomes the more detestable.
The gross debaucheries and atrocious cruelties are covered with a resplendent mental veil because of the systematic exposition of the philosophic principles in all fields of vice. Its justification by logical method as well as by precepts and examples only makes vice more horrible in effect, both for degenerate and normal beings
As long as the vice of gluttony has a hold on a man, all that he has done valiantly is forfeited by him: and as long as the belly is unrestrained, all virtue comes to naught.
Were there no desire there would be no virtue, and because one man desires what another does not, who shall say whether the child of his desire be Vice or Virtue?
To me it seems that liberty and virtue were made for each other. If any man wish to enslave his country, nothing is a fitter preparative than vice; and nothing leads to vice so surely as irreligion.
Excellence or virtue in a man will be the disposition which renders him a good man and also which will cause him to perform his function well.
Taste and elegance, though they are reckoned only among the smaller and secondary morals, yet are of no mean importance in the regulations of life. A moral taste is not of force to turn vice into virtue; but it recommends virtue with something like the blandishments of pleasure, and it infinitely abates the evils of vice.
But virtue too, as well as vice, is clad in flesh and blood.
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