Quotes, Aphorisms, Laws, and Thoughts

Vices & Virtues

A coward is a hero with a wife, children and a mortgage.
Marvin Kitman (1929- )

All the things I really like to do are either illegal, immoral, or fattening.
Alexander Woolcott (1887-1943)

Avarice is the sphincter of the heart.
Matthew Green (1696-1737)

Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels so good.
Anonymous

Courage is the fear of being thought a coward.
Horace Smith (1779-1849)

I either want less corruption, or more chance to participate in it.
Ashleigh Brilliant (1933- )

It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

It is better to be a coward for one minute than dead the rest of your life.
Irish proverb

It requires less mental effort to condemn than to think.
Emma Goldman (1869-1940)

My smoking might be bothering you, but it's killing me.
Anonymous

My virtue's still far too small, I don't trot it out and about yet.
Colette (1873-1954)

Never practice two vices at once.
Tallulah Bankhead (1902-1968)

Once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.
Thomas de Quincey (1785-1859)

Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

People who keep dogs are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves.
Henry James Byron (1834-1884)

Temptation laughs at the fool who takes it seriously.
Anonymous

There is something about a closet that makes a skeleton restless.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.
P.J. O'Rourke (1947- )

To say that a man is vain means merely that he is pleased with the effect he produces on other people. A conceited man is satisfied with the effect he produces on himself.
Max Beerbohm (1872-1956)

Very few reputations are gained by unsullied virtue.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Vice is its own reward.
Quentin Crisp (1908-1999)

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Virtue is its own revenge.
E.Y. Harburg (1896-1981)

We often forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore.
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680)

While having never invented a sin, I'm trying to perfect several.
Anonymous