Nurture Your Vice

This seems like an opportunity to remind people of some very good advice from Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker:

There are some people who say you shouldn’t have any weakeness at all – no vices. But if a man has no vices, he’s in great danger of making vices out of virtues, and there’s a spectacle. We’ve all seen them; men who were monsters of philanthropy and women who were dragons of purity. We’ve seen people who told the truth, through the Heavens fall, and the Heavens fell. No, no nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around. Then you’ll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of a whole city.

That’s very Apollonian in its way and something sorely needed nowadays.

1 comment… add one
  • Guarneri Link

    I wasn’t really sure of your intent here, given that Dionysian vice and chaos seems in no short supply in our culture and in our politics these days. And drunken benefactors as fanciful and rare as a Kakapo.

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