“The portrait I have to paint is of…an ambiguous character, a mixture of virtues and vices, a perpetual contrast between good impulses and bad actions.”
J'ai à peindre…un caractère ambigu, un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons sentiments et d'actions mauvaises.
Avis de l'auteur, p. 30; translation p. 3.
L'Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731)
Original
J'ai à peindre…un caractère ambigu, un mélange de vertus et de vices, un contraste perpétuel de bons sentiments et d'actions mauvaises.
L'Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut (1731)
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Antoine François Prévost 11
French novelist 1697–1763Related quotes
“Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied,
And vice sometime by action dignified.”
Source: Romeo and Juliet
Essay on the Immortality of the Soul
Context: Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue. -- Were one to go round the world with an intention of giving a good supper to the righteous, and a sound drubbing to the wicked, he would frequently be embarrassed in his choice, and would find that the merits and the demerits of most men and women scarcely amount to the value of either.
Life of Agesilaus II
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“Virtue, if not in action, is a vice,
And, when we move not forward, we go backward.”
The Maid of Honour (c. 1621; printed 1632), Act I, scene i.
“Good impulses are naught, unless they become good actions.”
frein vital
Representative Writings (1981), p. xvi
Variant translations:
Virtue and vice are not the same, even if they undergo the same torment.
The violence which assails good men to test them, to cleanse and purify them, effects in the wicked their condemnation, ruin, and annihilation.
The City of God (early 400s)
Context: Wherefore, though good and bad men suffer alike, we must not suppose that there is no difference between the men themselves, because there is no difference in what they both suffer. For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke; and under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed; and as the lees are not mixed with the oil, though squeezed out of the vat by the same pressure, so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them. For, stirred up with the same movement, mud exhales a horrible stench, and ointment emits a fragrant odor.
“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray