A Quote by William Hazlitt
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.
Related Quotes
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
Human nature itself is evermore an advocate for liberty. There is also in human nature a resentment of injury, and indignation against wrong. A love of truth and a veneration of virtue. These amiable passions, are the "latent spark" . . . If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply than to the sense of this difference?
That's the difference between irony and sarcasm. Irony can be spontaneous, while sarcasm requires volition. You have to create sarcasm.
Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.
Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.
Dali is like a man who hesitates between talent and genius, or, as one might once have said, between vice and virtue.
The truth is there's a difference between the competition shows where you're testing skills and the type of shows where you're trying to create drama.
The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.
Mothers know the difference between a broth and a consommé. And the difference between damask and chintz. And the difference between vinyl and Naugahyde. And the difference between a house and a home. And the difference between a romantic and a stalker. And the difference between a rock and a hard place.
Education makes a greater difference between man and man than nature has made between man and brute.
Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through past prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature.
Habit is a second nature that destroys the first. But what is nature? Why is habit not natural? I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.
Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.
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.
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