A Quote by Theodore Parker

Pride is both a virtue and a vice.

Theodore Parker

Quote Topics

Both Pride Vice Virtue

Quote Author

Theodore Parker
American - Theologian
August 24, 1810 - May 10, 1860

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

Virtue hath no tongue to check vice's pride.

John Milton

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

... bringing up daughters for nothing but marriage, mingles poison in the cup of domestic life, is traitorous to the virtue of both sexes, for neither suffers alone--is adverse to the happiness, to the development of conscience and to religion, and introduces to the dwellings of wretchedness and despair. The result of this degradation is pride, intemperance, licentiousness--nay, every vice, misery, and degradation.

Harriot Kezia Hunt

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

I hate when vice can bolt her arguments, And virtue has no tongue to check her pride.

John Milton

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

Epictetus

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

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

Ralph Venning

A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.

W. H. Auden

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.