| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
|---|
"Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime's by action dignified." | William Shakespeare | Romeo and Juliet |  |
| No virtue could charm him, no vice shock him. He had about him a natural good manner, which seemed to qualify him for the highest circles, and yet he was never out of place in the lowest. | Anthony Trollope | Barchester Towers | |
"I thought her
As chaste as unsunned snow." | William Shakespeare | Cymbeline | |
| If she did not wish to lead a virtuous life, at least she desired to enjoy a character for virtue . . . | William Makepeace Thackeray | Vanity Fair | |
| "Instead of always harping on a man's faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut of bad habits. Hold up to him his better self, his REAL self that can dare and do and win out!" | Eleanor H. Porter | Pollyanna | |
| It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with the composed faces and the regulated actions. | Charles Dickens | Hard Times | |
| "There's no credit in not doing what you don't want to do. There's no virtue in not falling, when you're not tempted." | Gilbert Parker | The Weavers | |
| "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together. Our virtues would be proud if our faults whipt them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherish'd by our virtues." | William Shakespeare | All's Well That Ends Well | |
| Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hairbreadth line. So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it. | Charles Dickens | A Tale of Two Cities | |
| So they lived, these men, in their own lusty, cheery fashion--rude and rough, but honest, kindly and true. Let us thank God if we have outgrown their vices. Let us pray to God that we may ever hold their virtues. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The White Company | |
| "My dear Watson," said he, "I cannot agree with those who rank modesty among the virtues. To the logician all things should be seen exactly as they are, and to underestimate one's self is as much a departure from truth as to exaggerate one's own powers." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Greek Interpreter | |
| Pride is one of the seven deadly sins; but it cannot be the pride of a mother in her children, for that is a compound of two cardinal virtues -- faith and hope. | Charles Dickens | Nicholas Nickleby | |
| "Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful." | William Shakespeare | Measure for Measure | |
| . . . being a man given to oratory and high principles, he enjoyed the sound of his own vocabulary and the warmth of his own virtue. | Sinclair Lewis | Babbitt | |
| "Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!" | Charles Dickens | Dombey and Son | |
| To his pure and knightly soul not Edith alone, but every woman, sat high and aloof, enthroned and exalted, with a thousand mystic excellencies and virtues which raised her far above the rude world of man. There was joy in contact with them; and yet there was fear, fear lest his own unworthiness, his untrained tongue or rougher ways should in some way break rudely upon this delicate and tender thing. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | Sir Nigel | |
| And Troy's deformities lay deep down from a woman's vision, whilst his embellishments were upon the very surface; thus contrasting with homely Oak, whose defects were patent to the blindest, and whose virtues were as metals in a mine. | Thomas Hardy | Far From The Madding Crowd | |
| "I am a citizen of the world, and I have met, in my time, with so many different sorts of virtue, that I am puzzled, in my old age, to say which is the right sort and which is the wrong." | Wilkie Collins | The Woman in White | |
