A morality that holds need as a claim, holds emptiness-non-existence-as its standard of value; it rewards an absence, a defect: weakness, inability, incompetence, suffering, disease, disaster, the lack, the fault, the flaw-the zero.
Write on your doors the saying wise and old. "Be bold!" and everywhere - "Be bold; Be not too bold!" Yet better the excess Than the defect; better the more than less sustaineth him and the steadiness of his mind beareth him out.
If youth is a defect, it is one we outgrow too soon.
My thing is, I'm just way too harsh. It's an enormous impediment, and that's just the truth of it. It doesn't make me any better, make me any worse, it certainly isn't more valorous. I have a character defect, man.
That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect, For slander's mark was ever yet the fair; The ornament of beauty is suspect, A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air.
Without a doubt, one of the things which keeps us from attaining perfection is our tongue. When one has reached the point of no longer committing faults in speech, he has surely reached perfection, as was said by the Holy Spirit. The worst defect in talking is talking too much. Hence, in speech be brief and virtuous, brief and gentle, brief and simple, brief and charitable, brief and amiable.
There is something wrong about the man who wants help. There is somewhere a deep defect, a want, in brief, a need, a crying need, somewhere about that man.
Weakness of character is the only defect which cannot be amended.
Tragedy has the great moral defect of giving too much importance to life and death.
It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.
The man who suffers from a sense of sin is suffering from a particular kind of self-love. In all this vast universe the thing that appears to him of most importance is that he himself should be virtuous. It is a grave defect in certain forms of traditional religion that they have encouraged this particular kind of self-absorption.
For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory.
Money never can be well managed if sought solely through the greed of money for its own sake. In all meanness there is a defect of intellect as well as of heart. And even the cleverness of avarice is but the cunning of imbecility.
Talent is often a defect in character.
If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
I have always been more interested in creating a character that contains something crippled. I think nearly all of us have some kind of defect.
Defect in one's limb ruins a man.
Youth, however, is a defect that she is fast getting away from and may perhaps be entirely rid of before I shall want her.
I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.