A Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

George Bernard Shaw

Quote Topics

Courageous Disobedience Distinguished Most Neglect Rarest Seldom Vices Virtues

Quote Author

George Bernard Shaw
Irish - Playwright
July 26, 1856 - November 2, 1950

It is not the most distinguished achievements that men's virtues or vices may be best discovered; but very often an action of small note. An casual remark or joke shall distinguish a person's real character more than the greatest sieges, or the most important battles.

Plutarch

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

Jonathan Swift

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

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

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

Virtues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial.

R. H. Tawney

Those vices [luxury and neglect of decent manners] are vices of men, not of the times. [Lat., Hominum sunt ista [vitia], non temporum.

Seneca the Younger

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

Thornton Wilder

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Juvenal

But we must not forget that only a very few people are artists in life; that the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.

Carl Jung

Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.

Charles Caleb Colton

Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.

Arthur Helps

Most men are more willing to indulge in easy vices than to practise laborious virtues.

Samuel Johnson

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.

Alec Guinness

We ought to be interested in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but the virtues that he cannot.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

A woman is seldom roused to great and courageous exertion but when something most dear to her is in immediate danger.