Marcel Proust Quotes

One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Human nature is weak enough and sufficiently beset by temptations without government adding to them and generating crime.

No legislation can suppress nature …. We can refuse to brand an act of nature as a crime, and to impute to vice what is due to ignorance.

Vice cannot be removed completely, nor is it right that it should be removed.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

Men wish to be saved from the mischiefs of their vices, but not from their vices.

He, who practices right, but in the hope of acquiring great renown, is very near to vice.

It is for you and me to show that no vice is inherent in man.

Weaknesses, so called, are nothing more nor less than vice in disguise!

Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!

Men love their vices and hate them at the same time.

Never trust a man who has not a single redeeming vice.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

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

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

That low vice, curiosity!

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

I never was so rapid in my virtue but my vice kept up with me.

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

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.

But virtue too, as well as vice, is clad in flesh and blood.