A Quote by Hippolyte Taine

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.

Hippolyte Taine

Quote Topics

Badges Becomes Below Change Circumstances Concealed Essential Far Fault Find Found Man Merit Moral Other Quality Regard Same Sides Two Two Sides Vice Virtue

Quote Author

Hippolyte Taine
French - Critic
April 21, 1828 - March 5, 1893

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.

Thomas Paine

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

Hosea Ballou

There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances.

Honore de Balzac

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.

Edmund Burke

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

Samuel Butler

Virtue and vice are not arbitrary things; but there is a natural and eternal reason for goodness and virtue, and against vice and wickedness.

John Tillotson

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

Kevin Brockmeier

Any virtue systematically applied becomes a vice. Morality is attention, not system.

James Richardson

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. […] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[…]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

C. S. Lewis

We assume therefore that moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

Aristotle

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

C. S. Lewis

Humor is not an unconditional virtue; its moral character depends on its object. To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue; to laugh at the good, is a hideous vice. Too often, humor is used as the camouflage of moral cowardice.

Ayn Rand

There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.

William Hazlitt

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.