Robin Skelton Quotes

The difference is too nice - Where ends the virtue or begins the vice.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

You will not! It's wrong." "What, kissing you, or kissing you in Pies and Stuff?

Oh, 'tis not my qualities they object to! 'Tis my lack of vice.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

Pleasure itself is not a vice

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

What we call vice in our neighbor may be nothing less than a crude virtue. To him who knows nothing more of precious stones than he can learn from a daily contemplation of his breastpin, a diamond in the mine must be a very uncompromising sort of stone.

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

There's nothing "wrong" with anything. "Wrong" is a relative term, indicating the opposite of that which you call "right." Yet, what is "right"? Can you be truly objective in these matters? Or are "right" and "wrong" simply descriptions overlaid on events and circumstances by you, out of your decision about them?

Every vice has its excuse ready.

Sometimes virtue starves while vice is fed.

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

We tolerate without rebuke the vices with which we have grown familiar.

The world will tolerate many vices, but not their diminutives.

Nothing can be more real, or concern us more, than our own sentiments of pleasure and uneasiness; and if these be favourable to virtue and unfavourable to vice, no more can be requisite to the regulation of our conduct and behavior.

The most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men.

A vice utterly at variance with the happiness of him who harbors it, and, as such, condemned by self-love.

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.

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

Vice is a dreary business. And virtue is not a lot of fun, either.

Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue in the eyes of bigots.

An ethicist is somebody who sees something wrong with whatever you have in mind.