John Milton Quotes

Innocence alone dares commit certain acts of audacity. Virtue, when tutored, is as calculating as vice.

Great parts produce great vices as well as virtues.

It is very questionable, in my mind, how far we have the right to judge one of another, since there is born within every man the germs of both virtue and vice. The development of one or the other is contingent upon circumstances.

Vice, like virtue, Grows in small steps, and no true innocence Can ever fall at once to deepest guilt.

What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.

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

Women who are the least bashful are not unfrequently the most modest; and we are never more deceived than when we would infer any laxity of principle from that freedom of demeanor which often arises from a total ignorance of vice.

No one is born without vices, and he is the best man who is encumbered with the least.

Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.

Your business as a writer is not to illustrate virtue but to show how a fellow may move toward it or away from it.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

We find that Good and Evil happen alike to all Men on this Side of the Grave; and as the principle Design of Tragedy is to raise Commiseration and Terror in the Minds of the Audience, we shall defeat this great End, if we always make Virtue and Innocence happy and successful.

Virtue, I grant you, is an empty boast; But shall the dignity of vice be lost?

Evil, which is our companion all our days, is not to be treated as a foe. It is wrong to cocker vice, but we grow narrow and pithless if we are furtive about it, for this is at best a pretense, and the sage knows good and evil are kindred. The worst of men harm others, and the best injure themselves.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.

It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse.

I was good and bad, but never wicked.

Cunning is none of the best nor worst qualities; it floats between virtue and vice; there is scarce any exigence where it may not, and perhaps ought not to be supplied by prudence.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

Patriotism is one of the unalterable facts of man's nature. It is a virtue if you like it, and a vice if you don't like it.

Wisdom is the right application of knowledge; and true education...is the application of knowledge to the development of a noble and Godlike character.

There is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep.

A virtue never tested is no virtue at all.