Jean Racine Quotes

Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness; he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious, and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.

There are certain seasons in the course of human affairs, when Genius, Virtue, and Patriotism, seems to nod over the vices of the times.

No one becomes depraved all at once.

Although a man has so well purged his mind that nothing can trouble or deceive him any more, yet he reached his present innocence through sin.

Vice is its own reward.

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

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.

Well, every little boy thinks he invented sin. Virtue we think we learn, because we are told about it. But sin is our own designing.

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

No man ever became very wicked all at once.

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.

No one ever suddenly became depraved.

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

Vice is contagious, and there is no trusting the sound and the sick together.

We don't see the people that vice destroys. We just see the glamour of it - everywhere we look, from billboard signs to movies, to newspapers, to magazines. We see the destruction of human life.

One principal characteristic of vice in the present age is the contempt of fame.

Sin will pluck on sin.

Women who are the least bashful are not unfrequently the most modest; and we are never more deceived than when we would infer any laxity of principle from that freedom of demeanor which often arises from a total ignorance of vice.

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

Vice is a peripatetic, always in progression.

Fattened in vice, so callous and so gross, he sins and sees not, senseless of his loss.