Daily Inspiration Quote by Antoine Rivarol

Rivarol’s line lands like a slap at the era’s favorite alibi: that wrongdoing is a tempest of feeling, a “moment” that overtakes you. By demoting vice from passion to habit, he strips it of romance and excuses. Passion implies heat, spontaneity, even tragedy; habit implies repetition, comfort, and a quiet choice made again and again. The sting is moral but also social: if vice is habitual, it’s embedded in routines, institutions, salons, and economies, not just in individual hearts.

As a late-18th-century journalist watching ancien regime manners harden into reflex, Rivarol is diagnosing a culture where corruption isn’t an eruption, it’s protocol. The subtext is less “people are bad” than “people become bad in boring, procedural ways.” That’s a sharper accusation because it suggests vice thrives on respectability. A passion can be repented; a habit has friends, schedules, and a convenient story attached to it.

The sentence is also a writerly move: crisp, balanced, and slightly clinical, it recasts moral life as behavioral life. That anticipates a modern, almost psychological view of ethics: you are what you rehearse. Rivarol’s intent isn’t to elicit pity for human weakness; it’s to deny readers the drama that lets them keep their self-image intact. If your vices are habits, the scandal isn’t that you lost control. It’s that you were perfectly in control, just on autopilot.