Virtue Quotes by William Hazlitt

The greatest offence against virtue is to speak ill of it.

— William Hazlitt

Vice, like disease, floats in the atmosphere.

— William Hazlitt

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit--or a mask.

— William Hazlitt

The measure of any man's virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even…

— William Hazlitt

People do not persist in their vices because they are not weary of them, but because they cannot leave them off. It…

— William Hazlitt

Death cancels everything but truth; and strips a man of everything but genius and virtue. It is a sort of natural canonization.

— William Hazlitt

Vice is man's nature: virtue is a habit -- or a mask. . . . The foregoing maxim shows the difference between truth and sarcasm.

— William Hazlitt

Modesty is the lowest of the virtues, and is a real confession of the deficiency it indicates. He who undervalues himself is…

— William Hazlitt

The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.

— William Hazlitt

To think ill of mankind and not wish ill to them, is perhaps the highest wisdom and virtue.

— William Hazlitt

I have known persons without a friend--never any one without some virtue. The virtues of the former conspired with their vices to…

— William Hazlitt

The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to ranking spleen and bigotry;…

— William Hazlitt

The confession of our failings is a thankless office. It savors less of sincerity or modesty than of ostentation. It seems as…

— William Hazlitt

Virtue steals, like a guilty thing, into the secret haunts of vice and infamy, clings to their devoted victim, and will not…

— William Hazlitt

True friendship is self-love at second hand; where, as in a flattering mirror we may see our virtues magnified and our errors…

— William Hazlitt

To a superior race of being the pretensions of mankind to extraordinary sanctity and virtue must seem... ridiculous.

— William Hazlitt

There is some virtue in almost every vice, except hypocrisy; and even that, while it is a mockery of virtue, is at…

— William Hazlitt

There is a heroism in crime as well as in virtue. Vice and infamy have their altars and their religion.

— William Hazlitt

We do not like our friends the worse because they sometimes give us an opportunity to rail at them heartily. Their faults…

— William Hazlitt

Let a man's talents or virtues be what they may, he will only feel satisfaction in his society as he is satisfied…

— William Hazlitt

Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another.

— William Hazlitt

A man in love prefers his passion to every other consideration, and is fonder of his mistress than he is of virtue.…

— William Hazlitt

“Features alone do not run in the blood; vices and virtues, genius and folly, are transmitted through the same sure but unseen…

— William Hazlitt

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force…

— William Hazlitt