Jonathan Swift Quotes

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

The name and pretense of virtue is as serviceable to self-interest as are real vices.

Honesty is of God and dishonesty of the devil; the devil was a liar from the beginning.

When our vices desert us, we flatter ourselves that we are deserting our vices.

It is bad for a young man to sin; but it is worse for an old man to sin.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

It's really amazing that in the age of unbelief, as a smart man called it, there isn't even more fraud. After all, with no God, there's no one to ever call you to account, and no accounting at all if you can get away with it.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

The man who spends all his time looking up to heaven is not always the best; in fact, he is usually the worst.

If the Great Way perishes there will morality and duty. When cleverness and knowledge arise great lies will flourish. When relatives fall out with one another there will be filial duty and love. When states are in confusion there will be faithful servants.

The governors of the world believe, and have always believed, that virtue can only be taught by teaching falsehood, and that any man who knew the truth would be wicked.

There are a great many men valued in society who have nothing to recommend them but serviceable vices.

You can be brilliant in some ways and despicable in others. You can be a clean, upright, moral individual in your private life who never swears, treats women with respect, and speaks highly of duty and honor - and go out every day and dedicate yourself to a cause that makes the world worse.

Tell troth and shame the devil.

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

A man given to vice is always an idealist.

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.

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

Villainy wears many masks; none so dangerous as the mask of virtue.

Power makes gods. Virtue makes martyrs.

Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.

Many pass for saints on earth whose souls are in hell.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

As often as we do good, we offer sacrifices to God.

Man is not equally moral at all hours, this is well known. If his morality is judged to be the capability for great self-sacrificing resolutions and self-denial (which, when continuous and grown habitual, are called holiness)