QUOTATION: Overcoming Vice

There is no vice which with God's assistance cannot be overcome, and there is no reason to fear that God will refuse to help us.

--St. Robert Bellarmine, The Seven Words on the Cross

QUOTATION: Correct Vice with its Opposite Virtue

If you are tempted to gluttony or sensuality, retrench something from your usual repasts, even though they in no way exceed the limits of sobriety, and give yourself with more fervor to fasting and other practices of devotion. If you are assailed by avarice, increase the amount of your alms and the number of your good works. If you feel the promptings of vainglory, lose no opportunity of accepting humiliations. Then, perhaps, the devil may fear to tempt you, seeing that you convert his snares into occasions of virtue, and that he only affords you opportunities of greater good.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: Toleration of Vice

It has come to pass, that Christians, by a sort of tacit agreement, wink at each other's faults, and keep silence; whereas, if each of us forced himself to make his neighbour sensible when he did wrong, he would both benefit another, and, through God's blessing, would bind himself also to a more consistent profession. Who can say how much harm is done by thus countenancing the imperfections of our friends and equals? The standard of Christian morals is lowered; the service of God is mixed up with devotion to Mammon; and thus society is constantly tending to a heathen state. And this culpable toleration of vice is sanctioned by the manners of the present age, which seems to consider it a mark of good breeding not to be solicitous about the faith or conduct of those around us, as if their private views and habits were nothing to us; which would have more pretence of truth in it, were they merely our fellow-creatures, but is evidently false in the case of those who all the while profess to be Christians, who imagine that they gain the privileges of the Gospel by their profession, while they bring scandal on it by their lives.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "Rebuking Sin", Parochial and Plain Sermons

QUOTATION: Overcoming Vice

He who wants to overcome vices should fight with the arms of love, not of rage.

--St. Peter Chrysologus

QUOTATION: Temptation

The more virtue a man has, the more he will be tempted, and the greater hatred must he have for vice.

--Blessed Giles of Assisi

QUOTATION: Chastity

In a fight between vice and a man of vice, vice wins and pins the man down. This is why continence and chastity are praised so highly: because they enable a man to abstain from the pleasures and delights that nature and passion offer him.

--St. Anthony Mary Claret, Autobiography

QUOTATION:Virtue and Vice

There is a set of religious, or rather moral, writings which teach that virtue is the certain road to happiness, and vice to misery in this world. A very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, namely, that it is not true.

--François Fenelon

QUOTATION: Virtue

Many men sneer at virtue because it makes vice uncomfortable.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen