Hypocrisy is the most difficult and nerve-racking vice that any mancanpursue; it needs anunceasing vigilance and a rare detachment of spirit.It cannot, like adulteryor gluttony, be practised at spare moments; it is a whole- time job.

-Maugham,W(illiam) Somerset
  Cakes and  Ale, ch.1.

That virtue therefore which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness.

-Milton,John
  Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout intotheregions of sinand falsity thanby reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

-Milton,John
  Areopagitica: a speech for the liberty of unlicensed printing.

J'aime mieux un vice commode Qu'une fatigante vertu. I prefer easygoing vice to tiresome virtue.

-Molie'  re,Jean Baptiste Poquelin
  Amphitryon, act1, sc.4.

Il n'ya qu'un seul vice dont on ne voie personne se vanter, c'est l'ingratitude. There is only one vice of which no one boastsöingratitude. 611

-Nerval, Ge¤  rard de pseudonym of  Ge¤  rard Labrunie
  Fragments,'Paradoxe et ve¤  rite¤ ' .

Punctuality is the vice of virtuous women.

-Patrick,John pseudonym of  John Patrick Goggan
  Line delivered by CliftonWebb in Three Coins in the Fountain.

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.

-Pope, Alexander
  An Essay on Man, epistle 2, l.217^19.

La cruaute¤  , bien loin d'e"  tre un vice, est le premier sentiment qu'imprime en nous la nature; l'enfant brise son hochet, mord le te¤  ton de sa nourrice, e¤  trangle son oiseau, bien avant que d'avoir l'a"  ge de raison. Far from being a vice, cruelty is the primary feeling that nature imprints in us. The infant breaks its rattle, bites its nurse's nipple, and strangles a bird, well before reaching the age of reason.

-Sade, Donatien Alphonse Fran c° ois, Marquis de
  La Philosophie dans le boudoir.

What a pity it is we have no amusements in England but vice and religion!

-Smith, Rev Sydney
Quoted in H PearsonThe Smith of Smiths, (1934), ch.10.

For that which all men then did virtue call, Is now called vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight virtue, and so used of all: Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right,

-Spenser, Edmund
  The Faerie Queen, bk.5, proem, stanza 4.

It would be hard to find a single instance of a direct assault by positive effort upon poverty, vice, and misery which has not either failed or, if it has not failed directly and entirely, has not entailed other evils greater than the one which it removed.

-Sumner,William Graham
  'Sociology', collected in War and Other Essays (1911).

Change in a trice The lilies and languors of virtue For the raptures and roses of vice.

-Swinburne, Algernon Charles
  Poems and Ballads,'Dolores', stanza 9.

The passionate heart of the poet is whirled into folly and vice.

-Tennyson
  Maud, pt.1, sect.4, stanza 7, l.139.

The vice of meanness, condemned in every other country, is in Scotland translated into a virtue called 'thrift'.

-Thomson, David
  Nairn in Darkness and Light.

So writing ismy sole remaining vice.It is an addiction, an illusory release, a presumptuous taming of reality, a way of expressing lightly the unbearable.

-Updike,John Hoyer
  Self-Consciousness,VI.'On Being A Self Forever'.

Virtue knows to a farthing what it has lost by not being vice.

-Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford
Quoted in L Kronenberger The Extraordinary MrWilkes (1973).

In the dying world I come from, quotation is a national vice. No one would think of making an after-dinner speech without the help of poetry. It used to be classics, now it's lyric verse.

-Waugh, Evelyn Arthur StJohn
  The Loved One, ch.9.