"Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it"
About this Quote
Shaw’s line is a trapdoor under respectable morality. It refuses to flatter the pious for merely staying out of trouble, and it refuses the melodrama of “temptation” as proof of character. Virtue, he argues, isn’t the white-knuckle performance of restraint; it’s a rewiring of appetite. If you want the vice and simply don’t do it, you’re not virtuous so much as supervised.
The intent is needle-sharp and characteristically Shavian: to expose how much of “goodness” is theater. Victorian and Edwardian Britain loved moral pageantry - propriety as a social credential, abstinence as evidence of worth. Shaw, the socialist and contrarian, treats that posture as a kind of spiritual bureaucracy: rules followed, stamps collected, conscience outsourced. By relocating virtue from behavior to desire, he raises the standard to something both more intimate and more threatening. You can’t get there with reputation management.
The subtext is almost clinical. If vice still feels like a treat, the vice has already won a quiet psychological foothold. Real moral progress, for Shaw, isn’t repression; it’s transformation. That’s why the line carries a faintly irritating purity: it denies the everyday heroism people claim in resisting habits they keep indulging in their imagination.
As a dramatist, Shaw also knows what desire does onstage. His characters aren’t undone by actions; they’re undone by cravings dressed up as principles. This quote is a jab at that self-deception - and at the culture that rewards it.
The intent is needle-sharp and characteristically Shavian: to expose how much of “goodness” is theater. Victorian and Edwardian Britain loved moral pageantry - propriety as a social credential, abstinence as evidence of worth. Shaw, the socialist and contrarian, treats that posture as a kind of spiritual bureaucracy: rules followed, stamps collected, conscience outsourced. By relocating virtue from behavior to desire, he raises the standard to something both more intimate and more threatening. You can’t get there with reputation management.
The subtext is almost clinical. If vice still feels like a treat, the vice has already won a quiet psychological foothold. Real moral progress, for Shaw, isn’t repression; it’s transformation. That’s why the line carries a faintly irritating purity: it denies the everyday heroism people claim in resisting habits they keep indulging in their imagination.
As a dramatist, Shaw also knows what desire does onstage. His characters aren’t undone by actions; they’re undone by cravings dressed up as principles. This quote is a jab at that self-deception - and at the culture that rewards it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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