“Does the love of virtue denote any wish to discover or amend our own faults? No, but it atones for an obstinate adherence to our own vices by the most virulent intolerance to human frailties.” — William Hazlitt, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” The Plain Speaker
“It is a false idea of virtue which thinks it demands the sacrifice of inclination and consists only in this sacrifice. An action is not virtuous merely because it is unpleasant to do.” — W. Somerset Maugham, A Writers Notebook
“Being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue.” — Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
“Impetuosity is a virtue only when delay is dangerous.” — Rex Stout, Too Many Clients
“All my foundation in virtue was no other than a total ignorance of vice.” — John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
“There’s no virtue in being old, it just takes a long time.” — Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
“Vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!” — Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
“If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.” — Elbert Hubbard, “The Better Part,” A message to Garcia and thirteen other things
“Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.” — Hugh Kingsmill, The Progress of a Biographer
“For indeed none can love freedom heartilie, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence.” — John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates
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