vices

At home I am a nice guy but I don't want the world to know. Humble people I've found don't go very far.

Well-adjusted means you can make the same mistakes over and over again and keep smiling.

I always read the last page of a book first so that if I die before I finish I'll know how it turned out.

Lead me not into temptation I can find the way myself.

We'd all like a reputation for generosity and we'd all like to buy it cheap.

I may have faults but being wrong ain't one of them.

O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mockThe meat it feeds on.

I had a dream about you last night. Our vices had wings and our fears could breathe fire. There was nowhere to hide and we were trapped alive. So you reached for your sword and slashed my arm, waking me and saving my life.

And do you know why we have not the power to attain this Stoic ideal? It is because we refuse to believe in our power. Nay, of a surety, there is something else which plays a part: it is because we are in love with our vices; we uphold them and prefer to make excuses for them rather than shake them off. We mortals have been endowed with sufficient strength by nature, if only we use this strength, if only we concentrate our powers and rouse them all to help us or at least not to hinder us. The reason is unwillingness, the excuse, inability.

I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.

If you didn't do anything that wasn't good for you it would be a very dull life. What are you gonna do? Everything that is pleasant in life is dangerous. Have you noticed that? I'd like to find the bastard that thought that one up.

What a pity human beings can't exchange problems. Everyone knows exactly how to solve the other fellow's.

She realizes she doesn't know as much as God but feels she knows as much as God knew when he was her age.

To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake - and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice your conscience, your reason, your integrity and your invaluable self-esteem.

Changing prejudice often inverts the value of words while preserving most of their sense; virtues are turned into vices, artistic qualities become defects.

How I admired people who talked about their vices as though they were distant relatives they'd learn to put up with because they couldn't quite disown them.

The greatest temptations are not those that solicit our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the greatest goods.

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices.