Francis Quarles Quotes

The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil's alphabet - the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

No man could be equipped for the presidency if he has never been tempted by one of the seven cardinal sins.

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

Pride, envy, avarice—these sparks Have set on fire the hearts of all men.

There, pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of depsair

Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin.

In recompense, envy may be the subtlest - perhaps I should say the most insidious - of the seven deadly sins.

Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

The heart which finds life in material wealth is usually certain to go farther and seek for more in the satisfaction of base and sullen appetites.

The perception of the right of every man to do pretty much as he pleases…. [which will produce] a general profligacy and corruption such as this country has never known.

These are the meats to abstain from- others' wealth, others' wives, slander, envy, covetousness and pride.

Religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.

Prosperity often leads to pride, which leads to sin.

If we lived in a State where virtue was profitable, common sense would make us good, and greed would make us saintly. And we'd live like animals or angels in the happy land that /needs/ no heroes. But since in fact we see that avarice, anger, envy, pride, sloth, lust and stupidity commonly profit far beyond humility, chastity, fortitude, justice and thought, and have to choose, to be human at all... why then perhaps we /must/ stand fast a little --even at the risk of being heroes.

A victim of your own greed, wallowing in the muck of avarice.

Vanitas vanitatum has rung in the ears Of gentle and simple for thousands of years; The wail still is heard, yet its notes never scare Either simple or gentle from Vanity Fair.

The pleasures of sin exist. We cannot deny them. But we also dare not deny what follows in their wake: a voracious appetite, inflamed with eroticism, demanding more indulgence more often until a degenerative spiral captures the soul and drags us on a never ending descent into deeper patterns of immorality and illicit behaviour... Lust goes beyond the sexual. Lust can show itself in a variety of forms: covetousness, gluttony, drunkeness, power hunger, or unbridled ambition, to name a few

IDLENESS, n. A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

Everything degenerates in the hands of man.

Avarice and luxury, those evils which have been the ruin of every great state.

There are men so incorrigibly lazy that no inducement that you can offer will tempt them to work; so eaten up by vice that virtue is abhorrent to them, and so inveterably dishonest that theft is to them a master passion.

He asks how the evil is to be remedied. I tell him that there seems to be little chance for avoiding the extremes of despotism or anarchy; that the only ground of hope must be the morals of the people, but that these are, I fear, too corrupt.

But in the present day men cast off gentleness, and are all for being bold; they spurn frugality, and retain only extravagance; they discard humility, and aim only at being first. Therefore they shall surely perish.