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58f1f49
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"The world says: "You have needs -- satisfy them. You have as much right as the rich and the mighty. Don't hesitate to satisfy your needs; indeed, expand your needs and demand more." This is the worldly doctrine of today. And they believe that this is freedom. The result for the rich is isolation and suicide, for the poor, envy and murder."
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greed
needs
materialism
selfishness
vice
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
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aef99ea
|
"Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '.
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relationships
depression
morality
happiness
depression-humor
the-key-to-happiness
oscar-wilde
marriage-advice
sins
self-pity
narcissism
self-improvement
pride
vice
self-help
sin
|
Stephen Fry |
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78d38ff
|
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as 'moral indignation,' which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue.
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virtue
hate
morality
indignation
envy
double-standards
vice
|
Erich Fromm |
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870132d
|
Our labour preserves us from three great evils -- weariness, vice, and want.
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want
greed
work
labor
weariness
need
vice
evil
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Voltaire |
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adef29a
|
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.
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sacrifice
death
god
glory
corruption
vice
evil
sin
|
Graham Greene |
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2b38ece
|
Your god, sir, is the World. In my eyes, you, too, if not an infidel, are an idolater. I conceive that you ignorantly worship: in all things you appear to me too superstitious. Sir, your god, your great Bel, your fish-tailed Dagon, rises before me as a demon. You, and such as you, have raised him to a throne, put on him a crown, given him a sceptre. Behold how hideously he governs! See him busied at the work he likes best -- making marriages. He binds the young to the old, the strong to the imbecile. He stretches out the arm of Mezentius and fetters the dead to the living. In his realm there is hatred -- secret hatred: there is disgust -- unspoken disgust: there is treachery -- family treachery: there is vice -- deep, deadly, domestic vice. In his dominions, children grow unloving between parents who have never loved: infants are nursed on deception from their very birth: they are reared in an atmosphere corrupt with lies ... All that surrounds him hastens to decay: all declines and degenerates under his sceptre. god is a masked Death.
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family-relationships
hatred
unhappiness
injustice
marriage
women
death
disparity
domestic-life
false-belief
lovelessness
scorn
unfreedom
disharmony
families
preconceptions
discord
married-life
worldliness
idolatry
decay
demons
matrimony
force
social-norms
society
hypocrisy
disgust
contempt
vice
expectations
|
Charlotte Brontë |
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ac0235e
|
So may the outward shows be least themselves: The world is still deceived with ornament. In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, But, being seasoned with a gracious voice, Obscures the show of evil? In religion, What damned error, but some sober brow Will bless it and approve it with a text, Hiding the grossness with fair ornament? There is no vice so simple but assumes Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
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virtue
religion
ornament
falsehood
law
pretense
vice
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William Shakespeare |
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a3263ca
|
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
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seduction
curiosity
knowledge
vice
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Umberto Eco |
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0957cc4
|
... as long as mankind shall continue to bestow more liberal applause on their destroyers than their benefactors, the thirst of military glory will ever be the vice of the most exalted characters.
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war-and-peace
valor
vice
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Edward Gibbon |
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b9e2171
|
When I was a young man and very well thought of, I couldn't ask aught that the ladies denied. I nibbled their hearts like a handful of raisins, And I never spoke love but I knew that I lied. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them know The secret I shelter and savor and save I wait for the one who will see through my seeming, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.' The years drifted over like clouds in the heavens; The ladies went by me like snow on the wind. I charmed and I cheated, deceived and dissembled, And I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned, and I sinned. But I said to myself, 'Ah, they none of them see There's part of me pure as the whisk of a wave. My lady is late but she'll find I've been faithful, And I'll know when I love by the way I behave.' At last came a lady both knowing and tender, Saying, 'you're not at all what they take you to be.' I betrayed her before she had quite finished speaking, And she swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea. And I say to myself when there's time for a word, As I gracefully grow more debauched and depraved, 'Ah, love may be strong, but a habit is stronger And I knew when I loved by the way I behaved.
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destructiveness
lament
vice
sin
habit
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Peter S. Beagle |
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47fec35
|
If you gamble long enough, you'll always lose -- the gambler is always ruined.
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gambling
vice
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Michael Crichton |
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b310cb4
|
Idleness is the beginning of all vice, the crown of all virtues.
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virtue
vice
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Franz Kafka |
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fd59d2a
|
"If this is vise I want no virtue. ... I know what happiness is possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it. My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It is its own purpose. Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.
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virtue
vice
|
Ayn Rand |
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be60771
|
In the first place I spent most of my time at home, reading. I tried to stifle all that was continually seething within me by means of external impressions. And the only external means I had was reading. Reading, of course, was a great help--exciting me, giving me pleasure and pain. But at times it bored me fearfully. One longed for movement in spite of everything, and I plunged all at once into dark, underground, loathsome vice of the pettiest kind. My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice. I have not said all this to justify myself .... But, no! I am lying. I did want to justify myself. I make that little observation for my own benefit, gentlemen. I don't want to lie. I vowed to myself I would not.
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vice
|
Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
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0460e17
|
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex.
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mankind
sex
motivation
vainglory
vice
sin
|
Barbara W. Tuchman |
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2c702f6
|
He who profits by villainy, has perpetrated it.
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villainy
profit
wrongdoing
vice
|
Iain Pears |
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d38b219
|
Well in two months, it'd be sunbathing time. That made me smile. I enjoyed lying in the sun in a little bikini, timing myself carefully so I didn't burn. I loved the smell of coconut oil. And I don't want to hear any lectures about how bad tanning is for you. That's my vice. Everybody gets one.
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coconut-oil
lectures
sunbathing
tanning
sookie-stackhouse
vice
|
Charlaine Harris |
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55b16ae
|
Virtue, should there be anyone who still ignores the fact, always finds pitfalls on the extremely difficult path of perfection, but sin and vice are so favoured by fortune...
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virtue
vice
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José Saramago |
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d4101d3
|
Each of you will have a chance to play it, and whosoever plays most sweetly, you will have it. For art is more than virtue or vice.
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virtue
vice
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Holly Black |
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dc025d9
|
All these institutions [prisons] seemed purposely invented for the production of depravity and vice, condensed to such a degree that no other conditions could produce it, and for the spreading of this condensed depravity and vice broadcast among the whole population.
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prison-camps
prisons
incarceration
vice
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Leo Tolstoy |
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b412a98
|
"I have brought peace to this land, and security," he began. "And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the unjust death of one single person? It may be desirable, it may win you praise from those who have happily survived you and prospered from your deeds, but you have committed ignoble acts, and have been too proud to own them. I have waited patiently here, hoping that you would come to me, for if you understood, then some of your acts would be mitigated. But instead you send me this manuscript, proud, magisterial, and demonstrating only that you have understood nothing at all." "I returned to public life on your advice, madam," he said stiffly. "Yes; I advised it. I said if learning must die it should do so with a friend by its bedside. Not an assassin." --
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virtue
injustice
killing
good
learning
philosophy
public-office
doctrine
prosperity
peace
pride
vice
soul
values
evil
|
Iain Pears |
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92b71a8
|
I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder. Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too--in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well--or ill? [...] In uncertainty I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty men want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world. We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal. Vice has always a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
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virtue
humanity
love
vice
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John Steinbeck |
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d1990f0
|
Virtue will cut your head off, vice will only cut your hair.
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|
virtue
women
judith
mistress
wife
vice
|
Honoré de Balzac |
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6f7b6bb
|
The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?
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monks
pedophilia
misogyny
hypocrisy
lust
vice
sin
|
Umberto Eco |
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1c5bc7b
|
A man treats his own faults as original sin and supposes them scattered everywhere with the seed of Adam. He supposes that men have then added their own foreign vices to the solid and simple foundation of his own private vices. It would astound him to realize that they have actually, by their strange erratic path, avoided his vices as well as his virtues.
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virtue
vice
|
G.K. Chesterton |
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041a107
|
You can't just jump into debauchery one night and expect to get the hang of it by morning. It takes years.
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|
sins-needles-sinning
vice
|
Jennifer Crusie |
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3656bf0
|
Honesty, like any inclination, can become a ruling passion, a monomania almost.
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virtue
vice
|
Sena Jeter Naslund |
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e45f2ed
|
Be informed, also, that this good and savoury Parish is the home of Hectors, Trapanners, Biters who all go under the general appelation of Rooks. Here are all the Jilts, Cracks, Prostitutes, Night-walkers, Whores, Linnen-lifters, who are like so many Jakes, Privies, Houses of Office, Ordures, Excrements, Easments and piles of Sir-reverence: the whores of Ratcliffe High-way smell of Tarpaulin and stinking Cod from their continuall Traffick with seamen's Breeches. There are other such wretched Objects about these ruined Lanes, all of them lamentable Instances of Vengeance. And it is not strange (as some think) how they will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre. Theft, Whoredom and Homicide peep out of the very Windows of their Souls; Lying, Perjury, Fraud, Impudence and Misery are stamped upon their very Countenances as now they walk within the Shaddowe of my Church.
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|
london-city
crime
vice
london
|
Peter Ackroyd |
|
539ef63
|
"The young woman quoted Turgenev, "If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly or even harm him, you reproach him with every defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself."
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turgenev
vice
|
Jack Vance |
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303def5
|
History, as taught by schools, has white washed the drunkenness out of the past. It has minimized the influence of drugs on history's great thinkers, and covered up the impact of prostitution and insults on human development.
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|
insult
history
vice
drugs
|
Robert Evans |
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f19318c
|
Sade's manicheistic dualism sees the world as irredeemably evil; vice must always prosper, virtue always despair. There is no hope for us as we are now.[...]Sade's vision is utterly without transcendence.
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|
virtue
transcendence
vice
|
Angela Carter |