A Quote by Luc de Clapiers

Vice stirs up war, virtue fights.

Luc de Clapiers

Quote Topics

Fights Up Vice Virtue War

Quote Author

Luc de Clapiers
French - Writer
August 6, 1715 - May 28, 1747

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

Luc de Clapiers

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

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 war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

George Grosz

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

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

There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.

George Bernard Shaw

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

Eric Hoffer

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

William Shakespeare

I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Samuel Butler

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

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.