A Quote by John Tillotson

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

Quote Topics

Against Arbitrary Eternal Goodness Natural Reason Things Vice Virtue Wickedness

Quote Author

John Tillotson
British - Theologian
1630 - November 22, 1694

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

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

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

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

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

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie

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

Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied, And vice sometime by action dignified.

William Shakespeare

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

Eric Hoffer

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice - but as yet unstained.

Lyman Abbott

A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice- but as yet unstained.

Lyman Abbott

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Samuel Butler

Vice foments war; it is virtue which actually fights. If there were no virtue, we would live in peace forever.

Luc de Clapiers

We pass for what we are. Character teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they communicate thier virtue or vice by overt actions, and do not see that virtue or vice emit a breath ever moment....One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zsig zag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficent distance and it straightens itslef to the average tendency.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If vice and corruption prevail, liberty cannot subsist; but if virtue have the advantage, arbitrary power cannot be established.