Bernard Mandeville Quotes on Virtue
Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714, expanded 1723) gave early eighteenth-century moral philosophy its most influential satirical critique of the prevailing virtue-ethical framework. The central thesis is that the apparent virtues of human social life — luxury restrained by moderation, charity tempered by prudence, the broader civic virtues — depend covertly on the very vices the moralists denounce: the entire commercial society of early Hanoverian England would collapse if its citizens actually practiced the austere benevolence the moralists profess to recommend. The framework, with its corresponding hypothesis that what passes for moral virtue is the product of clever politicians flattering human pride, supplied the principal philosophical target of Hutcheson, Hume, and the broader moral-sense tradition’s defense of the genuineness of moral virtue and shaped subsequent reflection on the relationship between commerce, virtue, and self-interest through Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment.
Quotes
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Attributed to Bernard Mandeville:
“Private vices, public benefits.”
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Attributed to Bernard Mandeville:
“Pride is the great support of art and industry.”
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Attributed to Bernard Mandeville:
“We do not need to be virtuous in order to live well in society.”
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Attributed to Bernard Mandeville:
“There are few persons in the world who can be sincerely modest.”
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“They that examine into the Nature of Man, abstract from Art and Education, may observe, that what renders him a Sociable Animal, consists not in his desire of Company, Good-nature, Pity, Affability, and other Graces of a fair Outside; but that his vilest and most hateful Qualities are the most necessary Accomplishments to fit him for the largest, and, according to the World, the happiest and most flourishing Societies.”
Preface -
“The worst of all the Multitude Did something for the Common Good.”
The Grumbling Hive", line 167, p. 9 -
“Thus Vice nurs'd Ingenuity, Which join'd with Time and Industry, Had carry'd Life's Conveniences, It's real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, To such a Height, the very Poor Liv'd better than the Rich before.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | "The Grumbling Hive", line 197, p. 11 -
“Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | "A Search into the Nature of Society", p. 428 -
“Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an Honest Hive. T'enjoy the World's Conveniences, Be fam'd in War, yet live in Ease, Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | "The Moral", line 1, p. 23 -
“Because Impudence is a Vice, it does not follow that Modesty is a Virtue; it is built upon Shame, a Passion in our Nature, and may be either Good or Bad according to the Actions perform'd from that Motive.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | Remark C, p. 65 -
“Pride and Vanity have built more Hospitals than all the Virtues together.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | "An Essay on Charity, and Charity-Schools", p. 294 -
“Luxury Employ'd a Million of the Poor, And odious Pride a Million more; Envy it self, and Vanity, Were Ministers of Industry; Their darling Folly, Fickleness, In Diet, Furniture and Dress, That strange ridic'lous Vice, was made The very Wheel that turn'd the Trade.”
The Fable of the Bees(1714) | "The Grumbling Hive", line 180, p. 10