Percy Bysshe Shelley Quotes

Those words, temperate and moderate, are words either of political cowardice, or of cunning, or seduction. A thing, moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

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

In vain will you fly from one vice if in your wilfulness you embrace another.

It is only in some corner of the brain which we leave empty that Vice can obtain a lodging. When she knocks at your door be able to say: "No room for your ladyship; pass on.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

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.

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.

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.

A vice is merely a pleasure to which somebody has objected.

My pleasures disappeared with my vices.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

A good man is not mine to see. Could I see a man possessed of constancy, that would satisfy me.

Pleasure itself is not a vice

Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion in vice.

Weakness is more opposed to virtue than is vice.

The friendships of the world are oft confederacies in vice, or leagues of pleasures.

We simply must get it through our heads that holding a low opinion of ourselves is not a virtue, but a vice.

Good Nature, and Evenness of Temper, will give you an easie Companion for Life; Vertue and good Sense, an agreeable Friend; Love and Constancy, a good Wife or Husband. Where we meet one Person with all these Accomplishments, we find an Hundred without any one of them.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

The thing I've discovered that is a help is that there isn't a simple virtue or a simple vice. They're always connected. If you have Tendency A, that you loathe, you can almost be sure that Tendency B, which you love, is somehow connected to it.

You must come to terms with your wholeself. the wholeness which exceeds all our virtue and all our vice.