Famous Quotes & Sayings

Richard Dawkins

Let us understand Darwinism so we can walk in the opposite direction when it comes to setting up society.

Robert M. Pirsig

The funny thing about insane people is that it is kind of the opposite of being a celebrity. Nobody envies you.

Virginia Woolf

The comparison between Coleridge and Johnson is obvious in so far as each held sway chiefly by the power of his tongue. The difference between their methods is so marked that it is tempting, but also unnecessary, to judge one to be inferior to the other. Johnson was robust, combative, and concrete; Coleridge was the opposite. The contrast was perhaps in his mind when he said of Johnson: "his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced.

Rebecca Solnit

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason -- its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things.

Eric Hoffer

Though they seem at opposite poles, fanatics of all kinds are actually crowded together at one end. It is the fanatic and the moderate who are poles apart and never meet.

Eric Hoffer

It takes a vice to check a vice, and virtue is the by-product of a stalemate between opposite vices.

Eric Hoffer

There is apparently no surer way of turning a thing into its opposite than by exaggerating it

Eric Hoffer

For though ours is a godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. And whether we are to line up with him or against him, it is well that we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.

Eric Hoffer

It is the pull of opposite poles that stretches souls. And only stretched souls make music.

Rebecca West

The general tendency [is] to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted.

Saint Augustine

The will is truly free, when it is not the slave of vices and sins.

William Graham Sumner

Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.

William Hazlitt

The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.

Laurence Sterne

I have so great a contempt and detestation for meanness, that I could sooner make a friend of one who had committed murder, than of a person who could be capable, in any instance, of the former vice. Under meanness, I comprehend dishonesty; under dishonesty, ingratitude; under ingratitude, irreligion; and under this latter, every species of vice and immorality in human nature.

Niccolo Machiavelli

A prince must be prudent enough to know how to escape the bad reputation of those vices that would lose the state for him, and must protect himself from those that will not lose it for him, if this is possible; but if he cannot, he need not concern himself unduly if he ignores these less serious vices.

Cassandra Clare

Perhaps [James Herondale] loved vice for vice's own sake.

Joseph Joubert

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

Mikhail Bulgakov

Cowardice was undoubtedly one of the most terrible vices - thus spoke Yeshua Ha-Nozri. 'No, philosopher, I disagree with you: it is the most terrible vice!

Will Durant

It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.

Ronald Reagan

Balancing your budget is like protecting your virtue. You have to learn when to say no.

Samuel Johnson

The highest panegyric, therefore, that private virtue can receive, is the praise of servants.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If there is no immortality, there is no virtue

Jose Marti

It is necessary to make virtue fashionable.

John Adams

We cannot insure success, but we can deserve it.

Friedrich Schiller

Virtue, though clothed in a beggar's garb, commands respect.

Quintilian

Although virtue receives some of its excellencies from nature, yet it is perfected by education. [Lat., Virtus, etiamsi quosdam impetus a natura sumit, tamen perficienda doctrina est.]

Pico Iyer

I would say that by virtue of transforming politics, [Dalai Lama] is in fact easily underestimated.