Isaac Barrow Quotes

I'm too old to adapt to somebody else's ways.

Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.

When I was younger, I could get that white-knuckle grip of holding on to an idea and not wanting to let it go.

The hour of reformation is always delayed; every delay gives vice another opportunity of fortifying itself by habit.

Part of the problem about authenticity is that virtues aren't the only things that are habit forming: the more someone behaves in a way that is damaging to self or to others, the more "natural" it will both seem and actually be. Spontaneity, left to itself, can begin by excusing bad behavior and end by congratulating vice.

We always want to do things the way we like, that's why we never change.

The vices of youth now exceed my powers, but not my fancy.

Other vices make their own way; this makes way for all vices. He that is a drunkard is qualified for all vice.

Sometimes you make up your mind about something without knowing why, and your decision persists by the power of inertia. Every year it gets harder to change.

Pride is the king of vices...it is the first of the pallbearers of the soul...other vices destroy only their opposite virtues, as wantonness destroys chastity; greed destroys temperance; anger destroys gentleness; but pride destroys all virtues.

The life even of a just man is a round of petty frauds; that of a knave a series of greater. We degrade life by our follies and vices, and then complain that the unhappiness which is only their accompaniment is inherent in the constitution of things.

The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.

Minor vices lead to major ones, but minor virtues stay put.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

Flattery, the dangerous nurse of vice.

Flattery was formerly a vice; it has now become the fashion.

I don't want to change. I haven't done it before, I won't do it now.

Some, either from being glued to vice by a natural attachment, or from long habit, no longer recognize its ugliness.

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

Lust is a sharp spur to vice, which always putteth the affections into a false gallop.

Vice is contagious, and there is no trusting the sound and the sick together.

We don't see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it - everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.

One principal characteristic of vice in the present age is the contempt of fame.

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.