John Lancaster Spalding Quotes

The virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

Every vice is only an exaggeration of a necessary and virtuous function.

Most virtue lies between two vices.

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

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

In avoiding one vice fools rush into the opposite extreme.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

If we should cease to be generous and charitable because another is sordid and ungrateful, it would be much in the power of vice to extinguish Christian virtues.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one's virtues.

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.

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

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.

Pleasure itself is not a vice

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

Averageness is a quality we must put up with. Men march toward civilization in column formation, and by the time the van has learned to admire the masters the rear is drawing reluctantly away from the totem pole.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.

The end of all moral speculations is to teach us our duty; and, by proper representations of the deformity of vice and beauty of virtue, beget correspondent habits, and engage us to avoid the one, and embrace the other.