Honore de Balzac Quotes

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

Hypocrisy is not a way of getting back to the moral high ground. Pretending you're moral, saying your moral is not the same as acting morally.

Hypocrisy is an homage that vice renders to virtue.

Virtue, thou in rags, may challenge more than vice set off with all the trim of greatness.

The whole truth is generally the ally of virtue; a half-truth is always the ally of some vice.

Vices and virtues are of a strange nature, for the more we have, the fewer we think we have.

After all, why be good? How many will actually believe it of us?

Virtue must be valuable, if men and women of all degrees pretend to have it.

People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid.

Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.

Nothing in our times has become so unattractive as virtue.

Every child is innocent because it has not been tempted, but only when we have been tempted and have remained pure, or when we have fallen, repented and reformed, are we virtuous.

The virtue of some people consists wholly in condemning the vices in others.

Virtue is persecuted more by the wicked than it is loved by the good.

The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is hypocrisy.

Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.

The most virtuous women have something within them, something that is never chaste.

Most virtue is a demand for greater seduction.

I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments.

The only way to survive among the evil and corrupt is to be even more wicked and more corrupt than they are!

I believe that courage is morally neutral. I can well imagine wicked people being brave and good people being timid or afraid. I don't consider it a moral virtue.