The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.
Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not be driven quite away. Nothing can destroy the human heart.
There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.
I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to make the whole world their enemies.
There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at the same time a compliment to it.
The vices are never so well employed as in combating one another.
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 in itself.
Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.
Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.