To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom. ~ Horace

A Vice is a defect in character.

Quotes

• At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.
  • Louis Bourdaloue, as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137

• Every other vice hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both.
  • Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

• The vices of which we are full we carefully hide from others, and we flatter ourselves with the notion that they are small and trivial; we sometimes even embrace them as virtues.
  • John Calvin, Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life, pg. 32

• Study to sever pleasure from vice.
  • Descartes, Discourse on Method, J. Veitch, trans. (1899), part 3, p. 32

• There are no vices more dangerous than those which simulate virtue.
  • Erasmus, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier (1501), as translated by Charles Fantazzi, in The Erasmus Reader (1990), p. 146

• To flee vice is the beginning of virtue, and to have got rid of folly is the beginning of wisdom.
  • Horace, Epistles, Book I, epistle 1, line 41

• No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.
  • Jean de La Bruyère, Characters, H. Van Laun, trans. (London: 1885) “Of the Affections,” #72

• We must carefully teach children to detest vices for what they consist in; we must teach them their natural ugliness, so that they flee them not only in their deeds but in their minds: the very thought of them should be hateful, whatever mask they hide behind.
  • Montaigne, Essays, as translated by M. A. Screech, p. 124

• L’hypocrisie est un hommage que le vice rend à la vertu.
  • Hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue.
    • François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, L. Tancock trans., #218

• Aliena vitia in oculis habemus, a tergo nostra sunt.
  • The vices of others we have before our eyes, our own are behind our backs.
    • Seneca the Younger, in Latin Quotations (New York: 2005), p. 7

• The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.
  • Elizabeth Taylor, as quoted in The Seven Deadly Sins (2000) by Steven Schwartz, p. 23.

• I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
  • Mark Twain, "Answers to Correspondents", The Californian, 17 June 1865. Reprinted in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867).

• God commands (people) to maintain justice, kindness, and proper relations with their relatives. He forbids them to commit indecency, sin, and rebellion.
  • Quran, 16:90

See also

• Crime
• Sin
• Virtue
• List of vices

External links