There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.
 Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854). copy citation

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Author Henry David Thoreau
Source Walden
Topic investment vice
Date 1854
Language English
Reference
Note
Weblink https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm

Context

“If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats, and other such savage tid-bits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the mill-pond, she to her preserve-pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking. Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails. In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us. The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe’s Insurance Company, recommending its laws, and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.” source