Cool Quotes - V

Vacant heart, and hand, and eye,
Easy live and quiet die.

It doesn't matter where I go, just as long as no one goes with me. I could vacation in my own home if everyone would leave me the fuck alone.

No, I'm gonna stay home. You can take a family vacation, and I'll take a vacation from the family. Trust me, it'll make both of our time more enjoyable.

[The] emperor of the West, the feeble and dissolute Valentinian, [had] reached his thirty-fifth year without attaining the age of reason or courage.

The invariable laws of nature [have] connected peace with innocence, plenty with industry, and safety with valor.

In the loss of an object, we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.

Vanity makes us do more things against inclination than reason.

Vanity, thus confirmed in her dominion, readily listens to the voice of idleness, and sooths the slumber of life with continual dreams of excellence and greatness.

Nothing, therefore, can show greater depravity of understanding, than to delight in the show when the reality is wanting; or voluntarily to become poor, that strangers may for a time imagine us to be rich.

Yet vanity inclines us to find faults any where rather than in ourselves. He that reads and grows no wiser, seldom suspects his own deficiency; but complains of hard words and obscure sentences, and asks why books are written which cannot be understood?

The joy of life is variety; the tenderest love requires to be rekindled by intervals of absence.

The great source of pleasure is variety. Uniformity must tire at last, though it be uniformity of excellence. We love to expect; and, when expectation is disappointed or gratified, we want to be again expecting.

As there is no character so deformed as to fright away from it the prostitutes of praise, there is no degree of encomiastick veneration which pride has refused.

I think that sick people in Ankh-Morpork generally go to a vet. It's generally a better bet. There's more pressure on a vet to get it right. People say "it was god's will" when granny dies, but they get angry when they lose a cow.

Personally, I have always felt the best doctor in the world is the veterinarian. He can't ask his patients what is the matter—he's got to just know.

The truth is that cupidity, selfishness, envy, malice, lust, vindictiveness, are constant vices of human nature.

Nine-tenths of our measures for preventing vice are really protective towards it, because they ward off the penalty.

Moral vices prosper by dressing themselves as virtues.

The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us.

If this be a world of vice and woe, I'll take the vice and you take the woe.

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

A man, indeed, is not genteel when he gets drunk; but most vices may be committed very genteelly: a man may debauch his friend's wife genteelly: he may cheat at cards genteelly.

By hating vices too much, they come to love men too little.

The decline of society can always be traced to vices which arise from wrong attitudes.

What often prevents us from abandoning ourselves to one vice is that we have several. (Ce qui nous empêche souvent de nous abandonner à un seul vice est que nous en avons plusieurs.)

[We] live in an age where victimhood is the new currency, victims a new kind of aristocracy, and pity a cardinal virtue.

Whenever you think something or some person is ruining your life, it's you. A victimization mentality is so debilitating.

The cultivation—even celebration—of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

The problems of victory are more agreeable than the problems of defeat, but they are no less difficult.

Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan. (La vittoria trova cento padri, e nessuno vuole riconoscere l'insuccesso.)

Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories.

His self-love is well requited.

In Japan people drive on the left. In China people drive on the right. In Vietnam it doesn't matter.

See one promontory (said Socrates of old), one mountain, one sea, one river, and see all.

When we reflect upon the brutal vices of these salt-water bandits [Vikings], pirates as shameful as any whom the sea has borne, or recoil from their villainous destruction and cruel deeds, we must also remember the discipline, the fortitude, the comradeship and martial virtues which made them at this period beyond all challenge the most formidable and daring race in the world.

He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite virginity.

Dogbert: I can predict the future by assuming that money and male hormones are the driving forces for new technology. Therefore, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.

The easy, gentle, and sloping path … is not the path of true virtue. It demands a rough and thorny road.

[For] the great incentive to virtue is the reflection that we must die.

The tribe is likewise very numerous of those who regulate their lives, not by the standard of religion, but the measure of other men's virtue; who lull their own remorse with the remembrance of crimes more atrocious than their own, and seem to believe that they are not bad while another can be found worse.

Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable … one false step involves her in endless ruin.

Most men admire Virtue who follow not her lore.

Virtue is harder to be got than a knowledge of the world; and, if lost in a young man, is seldom recovered.

It may be at least inculcated that pleasures are more safely postponed than virtues, and that greater loss is suffered by missing an opportunity of doing good, than an hour of giddy frolick and noisy merriment.

The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws.

The utmost excellence at which humanity can arrive, is a constant and determinate pursuit of virtue, without regard to present dangers or advantage; a continual reference of every action to the divine will; an habitual appeal to everlasting justice; and an unvaried elevation of the intellectual eye to the reward which perseverance only can obtain.

Consider your origins: you were not made to live as brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

(Considerate la vostra semenza:
Fatti non foste a viver come bruti,
Ma per seguir virtute e conoscenza.)

I see the rural virtues leave the land.

I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.

Narrations of romantick and impracticable virtue will be read with wonder, but that which is unattainable is recommended in vain; that good may be endeavoured, it must be shewn to be possible.

I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat … that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary.

Virtue shuns ease as a companion … It demands a rough and thorny path. (La vertu refuse la facilité pour compagne … Elle demande un chemin âpre et épineux.)

If everyone were clothed with integrity,
If every heart were just, frank, kindly,
The other virtues would be well-nigh useless,
Since their chief purpose is to make us bear with patience
The injustice of our fellows.

(Si de probité tout était revêtu,
Si tous les cœurs était francs, justes et dociles,
La plupart des vertus nous seraient inutiles,
Puisqu'on en met l'usage à pouvoir sans ennui
Supporter dans nos droits l'injustice d'autrui.)

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

I prefer an accommodating vice to an obstinate virtue.

Perhaps it would not be easy, within the same historical space, to find more vice and less virtue. We are continually shocked by the union of savage [Barbarian] and corrupt [Roman] manners.

It was [Totila's] constant theme, that national vice and ruin are inseparably connected; that victory is the fruit of moral as well as military virtue; and that the prince, and even the people, are responsible for the crimes which they neglect to punish.

The problem with people who have no vices is that generally you can be pretty sure they're going to have some pretty annoying virtues.

[Only] a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Search others for their virtues, thy self for thy vices.

But if he does really think that there is no distinction between virtue and vice, why, Sir, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

It seldom happens that we can contain ourselves long in a neutral state, or forbear to sink into vice, when we are no longer soaring towards virtue.

Virtue can stand without assistance, and considers herself as very little obliged by countenance and approbation: but vice, spiritless and timorous, seeks the shelter of crowds, and support of confederacy.

The wicked are wicked, no doubt, and they go astray and they fall, and they come by their deserts; but who can tell the mischief which the very virtuous do?

We try to make virtues out of the faults we have no wish to correct. (Nous essayons de nous faire honneur des défauts que nous ne voulons pas corriger.)

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

The dwarf sees farther than the giant, when he has the giant's shoulder to mount on.

Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.

Believe nothing of what you hear, and only half of what you see.

Visits always give pleasure—if not the arrival, the departure.

Seldom set foot in your neighbor's house—
too much of you, and he will hate you.

There are many that think I am too fierce against popedom; on the contrary, I complain that I am, alas! too mild; I wish I could breath out lightning against pope and popedom, and that every word were a thunderbolt.

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or senator, and remain fit for anything else.

It takes patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer unhappiness.

If voting changed anything, they'd abolish it. [Variation: If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.]

Voting is meaningless; this country was bought and paid for a long time ago.