Quintilian Quotes

Ambition is a vice, but it may be the father of virtue.

In order to know virtue, we must first acquaint ourselves with vice.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.

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.

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

The weak-minded man is the slave of his vices and the dupe of his virtues.

We do not despise all those who have vices, but we do despise those that have no virtue.

The vices and the virtues are written in a language the world cannot construe; it reads them in a vile translation, and the translators are Failure and Success.

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

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

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.

Virtuous and vicious every man must be, few in the extreme, but all in the degree.

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.

It is as hard to satirize well a man of distinguished vices, as to praise well a man of distinguished virtues.

Without enthusiasm, virtue functions not at all, and vice only poorly.

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

Our virtues and vices couple with one another, and get children that resemble both their parents.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be. Try to make people moral, and you lay the groundwork for vice.

Hast thou virtue? acquire also the graces and beauties of virtue.

Let us go home and cultivate our virtues.

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

The virtues of society are the vices of the saints.

Virtue needs a director and guide. Vice can be learned even without a teacher.