A Quote by Ralph Venning

Virtue and vice are both prophets; the first, of certain good; the second, of pain or else of penitence.

Ralph Venning

Quote Topics

Both Certain Else First Good Pain Penitence Prophets Second Vice Virtue

Quote Author

Ralph Venning
1621 - 1673

Counsel and conversation is a good second education, that improves all the virtue and corrects all the vice of the former, and of nature itself.

Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.

John Steinbeck

Natural good is' so intimately connected with moral good, and natural evil with moral evil, that I am as certain as if I heard a voice from heaven proclaim it, that God is on the side of virtue. He has learnt much, and has not lived in vain, who has practically discovered that most strict and necessary connection, that does and will ever exist between vice and misery, and virtue and happiness.

Charles Caleb Colton

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

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

The happy sequence culminating in fellowship with God is penitence, pardon, and peace - the first we offer, the second we accept, and the third we inherit.

Charles Brent

Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Pride is both a virtue and a vice.

Theodore Parker

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

The first virtue in a soldier is endurance of fatigue; courage is only the second virtue.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Freedom and slavery, the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.

Epictetus

I find it difficult to say I'm black first and a woman second or vice versa. I can't make that kind of distinction. Amongst Aboriginal women I do my best to raise their consciousness both as women and as Aboriginals.

Pat O'Shane

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.