Charles Dickens Quotes

Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Most virtue lies between two vices.

Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency . . .

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

In every extreme there is vice and not virtue.

… vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

The vices enter into the composition of the virtues, as poisons into that of medicines. Prudence collects and arranges them, and uses them beneficially against the ills of life.

There is a mean in all things; even virtue itself has stated limits; which not being strictly observed, it ceases to be virtue.

In avoiding one vice fools rush into the opposite extreme.

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Be not righteous overmuch.

Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.

Just as lavishness leads easily to presumption, so does frugality to meanness. But meanness is a far less serious fault than presumption.

Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.

If we escape punishment for our vices, why should we complain if we are not rewarded for our virtues?

Virtue is voluntary, vice involuntary.

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

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean.

Virtue lies half way between two opposite vices.

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.