Michel de Montaigne Quotes

How could you do nothing to him, if you fought so hard?” she asked. “I’m lust and he’s wrath!” he yelled. “I’m a lover, he’s a fighter!” Virtue - A Fairy Tale

Evil borders upon good, and vices are confounded with virtues; as the report of good qualities is delightful to a well-disposed mind, so the relation of the contrary should not be offensive.

The amiable is a duty most certainly, but must not be exercised at the expense of any of the virtues. He who seeks to do the amiable always, can only be successful at the frequent expense of his manhood.

Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.

This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

Goodness is equally hateful to the wicked, as vice is to the virtuous.

Moral virtue is a mean . . . between two vices, one of excess and the other of defect; . . . it is such a mean because it aims at hitting the middle point in feelings and in actions. This is why it is a hard task to be good, for it is hard to find the middle point in anything.

Partly, I like a bad reputation. But I also want a reputation of being a good person.

There is a contest old as Eden, which still goes on - the conflict between right and wrong, between error and truth. In this conflict every human being has a part.

We make a ladder for ourselves of our vices, if we trample those same vices underfoot.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

True honor is an outflow from a heart that fears God.

We don't honor just to get a reward; we honor because it is the heart of God, and it is our delight.

Virtue that wavers is not virtue.

Worthy of honor is he who does no injustice, and more than twofold honor, if he not only does no injustice himself, but hinders others from doing any.

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

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.

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.

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

We assume therefore that moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.