Francis Quarles Quotes

To vice, innocence must always seem only a superior kind of chicanery.

We have a Sunday code and a weekday code. We preach good and practice evil. We clothe the wolf of our actions in the sheep's clothing of our beautiful phrases.

The friends of Job appear on the scene as advisers and "consolers," offering Job the fruits of their moral scientia. But when Job insists that his sufferings have no explanation and that he cannot discover the reason for them through conventional ethical concepts, his friends turn into accusers, and curse Job as a sinner. Thus, instead of consolers, they become torturers by virtue of their very morality, and in so doing, while claiming to be advocates of God, they act as instruments of the devil.

He knows much of what men paint themselves would blister in the light of what they are.

Because hypocrisy stinks in the nostrils one is likely to rate it as a more powerful agent for destruction than it is.

Public displays of puritanical religiosity mask the private perversions of the real Washington behind closed doors.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

The only way the devil really exists in my opinion... is in interactions with people who don't walk the walk and talk the talk; people who act one way, or talk one way and then do another. Those are the deals with the devil. I don't see the devil as somebody who is a horned, goateed guy with a fork in his hand that's there to continuously stab me and send my soul to hell. I don't see it that way at all.

Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to [profess] things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

Fine words dresse ill deedes.

put on the livery of the best master only to serve the worst.

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotsman to draw the trigger at his death.

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul producing holy witness Is like a villain with a smiling cheek, A goodly apple rotten at the heart. O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.

Lying is a most disgraceful vice; it first despises God, and then fears men.

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

Lying is a terrible vice, it testifies that one despises God, but fears men.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

Had he been willing to live a hypocrite, he would have been respectable, he at least could have died surrounded by other hypocrites, and at his death there would have been an imposing funeral, with miles of carriages, filled with hypocrites, and above his hypocritical dust there would have been a hypocritical monument covered with lies.

Men chase by night those they will not greet by day.

Often a noble face hides filthy ways.

A bizarre sensation pervades a relationship of pretense. No truth seems true.