Alexander Pope Quotes

If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, piousness is virtue paying tribute to itself.

The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Being virtuous is wonderful thing, but feeling virtuous is a shortcut to vice.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

Virtue, once bragged about, once you pride yourself upon it, ceases to be such.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

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

You proclaim that one should die for the highest virtues, because you take it for granted that nobody's been living for them, not even for a single hour.

If he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.

The world is ashamed of being virtuous.

There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.

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

Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.

Debased men, but they all had something in common: They showed a keen regard for virtue, and tried to dress themselves in that costume. Hypocrisy, for all its bad reputation, at least showed a decent respect for goodness.

Virtue does not truly reward her votary if she leaves him sad and half doubtful whether it would not have been better to serve vice.

How wholesome winter is, seen far or near; how good, above all mere sentimental, warm-blooded, short-lived, soft-hearted, moral goodness, commonly so called. Give me the goodness which has forgotten its own deeds,--which God has seen to be good, and let be.

Demand not that I am the equal of the greatest, only that I am better than the wicked.

Can it be, that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a Nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human Nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?

There is probably no one, however rigid his virtue, who is not liable to find himself, by the complexity of circumstances, living at close quarters with the very vice which he himself has been most outspoken in condemning -- without altogether recognizing it beneath the disguise of ambiguous behavior which it assumes in his presence.

Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.

He who has knowledge of the just and the good and beautiful ... will not, when in earnest, write them in ink.