“Virtue has a veil, vice a mask.”
“True vice, my lady, would frighten us all, if it did not wear the mask of virtue. (p.56)”
“Vice, in its true light, is so deformed, that it shocks us at first sight; and would hardly ever seduce us, if it did not at first wear the mask of some virtue. ”
“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”
“Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn.”
“It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues.”