Joshua

“That is the danger of having principles. In politics, principle is like a sword aimed at the heart. Far better, one might be forgiven for thinking, for a lord to have no principles than to risk that he might fall on that sword. The principled man simply has more to lose. It is what makes them such fabulous villains.”
― Christopher Ruocchio

“Be virtuous' says the copy-book, 'and you will be happy.' Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this respect it is only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice brings no very serious mischief on a man's later years it is not so bad a vice as it is said to be.”
― Samuel Butler

“There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter--things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite.”
― Samuel Butler

“Unharmed with naked feet she trod
Upon the hot and burning stars”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Longfellow's Complete Poems: Illustrated