Charles Caleb Colton Vice Quotations

When in reading we meet with any maxim that may be of use, we should take it for our own, and make an immediate application of it, as we would of the advice of a friend whom we have purposely consulted.

When all run by common consent into vice, none appear to do so.

Vice has more martyrs than virtue; and it often happens that men suffer more to be lost than to be saved.

The martyrs to vice far exceed the martyrs to virtue, both in endurance and in number.

When we feel a strong desire to thrust our advice upon others, it is usually because we suspect their weakness; but we ought rather to suspect our own.

No company is preferable to bad. We are more apt to catch the vices of others than virtues, as disease is far more contagious than health.

We ask advice but we mean approbation.

Drunkenness is the vice of a good constitution or of a bad memory of a constitution so treacherously good that it never bends till it breaks; or of a memory that recollects the pleasures of getting intoxicated, but forgets the pains of getting sober.

The moral cement of all society is virtue; it unites and preserves, while vice separates and destroys.

Love, like the cold bath, is never negative, it seldom leaves us where it finds us; if once we plunge into it, it will either heighten our virtues, or inflame our vices.

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.

He that is good will infallibly become better, and he that is bad will as certainly become worse; for vice, virtue, and time are three things that never stand still.