This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion. This makes nothing in their favor, but is a proud compliment to man’s nature. Whatever he is or does, he cannot entirely efface the stamp of the divinity on him. Let him strive ever so, he cannot divest himself of his natural sublimity of thought and affection, however he may pervert or deprave it to ill.
Crime | Divinity | Infamy | Man | Nature | Nothing | Religion | Thought | Virtue | Virtue | Thought | Vice |
People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It is the nature of vice to leave us no resource but itself.
Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy.
Affectation | Appearance | Distinction | Envy | Folly | Infamy | Passion | Pride | Qualities | Superiority | Think | Vice |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
Work banishes those three great evils: Boredom, vice and poverty.
The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy | Repentance | Vice |
Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
The real vice of a civilized republic is in the Turkish fable of the dragon with man heads and the dragon with many tails. The many heads hurt each other, and the many tails obey a single head which wants to devour everything.
Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant
Every vice was once a virtue, and may become respectable again, just as hatred becomes respectable in wartime.
David Bohm, fully David Joseph Bohm
The subtle is what is basic and the manifest is its result. The subtler has power to transform the gross but not vice versa.
Edith Sitwell, fully Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
Good taste is the worst vice ever invented.
Eugène Ionesco, born Eugen Ionescu
No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.
Loud indignation against vice often stands for virtue with bigots.
Indignation | Virtue | Virtue | Vice |
In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.
Art | Daring | Evil | Existence | Good | Honor | Indifference | Judgment | Man | Nothing | Opinion | Pleasure | Present | Purpose | Purpose | Reason | Receive | Art | Learn | Vice |