It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile . . . That is not imagination. No, it kills it. . . . Your universities? Oh, yes, you have learned men who collect . . . facts, and facts, and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?

The need to be right - the sign of a vulgar mind.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

The smaller the mind, the greater the conceit.

Ignobly vain, and impotently great.

Human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

It is an infantile superstition of the human spirit that virginity would be thought a virtue and not the barrier that separates ignorance from knowledge.

Pleasure is a vain illusion; she draws you on to a thousand follies, errors, and I may say vices, and then leaves you to deplore your thoughtless credulity.

Speaking much also is a sign of vanity; for he that is lavish in words is a niggard in deeds.

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings.

As display is vulgar, so fondness for jewelry is evidence of an uncultivated mind.

The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

Greed is not a defect in the gold that is desired but in the man who loves it perversely by falling from justice which he ought to esteem as incomparably superior to gold; nor is lust a defect in bodies which are beautiful and pleasing: it is a sin in the soul of the one who loves corporal pleasures perversely, that is, by abandoning that temperance which joins us in spiritual and unblemishable union with realities far more beautiful and pleasing; nor is boastfulness a blemish in words of praise: it is a failing in the soul of one who is so perversely in love with other peoples' applause that he despises the voice of his own conscience; nor is pride a vice in the one who delegates power, still less a flaw in the power itself: it is a passion in the soul of the one who loves his own power so perversely as to condemn the authority of one who is still more powerful.

…vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!