“Virtue is more to be feared than vice, because its excesses are not subject to the regulation of conscience.”
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Adam Smith 175
Scottish moral philosopher and political economist 1723–1790Related quotes
“More people are flattered into virtue than bullied out of vice.”
The Analysis of the Hunting Field (1846) ch. 1
“Benevolence is more a vice of pride than a true virtue of the soul.”
First Dialogue, Delmonce
Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795)
“We are far more liable to catch the vices than the virtues of our associates.”
As quoted in Thesaurus of Epigrams: A New Classified Collection of Witty Remarks, Bon Mots and Toasts (1942) by Edmund Fuller
The Novel: What It Is (1893)
"Would you like to see a little of it?" said the Mock Turtle. (3 April 2010)
Unfit for Mass Consumption (blog entries), 2010
Context: Could anything be more inimical to art than a fear of emotion, or a fear of "excessive" emotion, or a reluctance to express emotion around others? No, of course not. Art can even best the weights of utter fucking ignorance and totalitarian repression, but it cannot survive emotional constipation.
I want a T-shirt that says, "Art is Emo." We live in an age where people are more apt to believe a thing if they read it on a T-shirt.
“743. As Virtue is its own Reward, so Vice is its own Punishment.”
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)
“Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity.”
Pt. I, ch. 1, sec. 6.
1920s, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929)
Context: Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.