Ambrosio was yet to learn, that to an heart unacquainted with her, Vice is ever most dangerous when lurking behind the Mask of Virtue.

Every vice leads to cruelty. Even a good emotion, pity, if not controlled by charity and justice, leads through anger to cruelty. Most atrocities are stimulated by accounts of the enemy's atrocities; and pity for the oppressed classes, when separated from the moral law as a whole, leads by a very natural process to the unremitting brutalities of a reign of terror.

Virtue practiced to be seen is not real virtue; vice which fears to be seen is real vice

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Any virtue taken to the extreme becomes a vice; unfortunately it doesn't work the other way.