Francis Quarles Quotes

Evil changes everybody!

The quest for riches darkens the sense of right and wrong.

Vice is a creature of such hideous mien... that the more you see it the better you like it.

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Power and privilege constantly corrupt the soul. I have to remind myself of this every day.

I feel like every time you think you really understand how deep the seductive power of evil is, it always proves to be one step deeper than you thought possible.

Evil courses can yield pleasure no longer than while thought and reflection can be kept off.

My soul, never laugh at sin's fooleries, lest thou come to smile at sin itself. It is thine enemy, and thy Lord's enemy.

You carry your snare everywhere and spread your nets in all places. You allege that you never invited others to sin. You did not indeed, by your words, but you have done so by your dress and your deportment.

If the sins of the flesh ever got old I didn't ever want enough years on me to know it.

So great an advantage is given to sin and Satan by your temper and disposition, that without extraordinary watchfulness, care, and diligence, they will prevail against your soul.

Sin will usher in the greatest and the saddest losses that can be upon our souls.

Every word first looks around in every direction before letting itself be written down by me.

Sin has made us stupid, so that we can only learn the hard way.

Everything can be seen directly except the eye through which we see.

The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed.

When Satan cannot get a great sin in he will let a little one in, like the thief who goes and finds shutters all coated with iron and bolted inside. At last he sees a little window in a chamber. He cannot get in, so he puts a little boy in, that he may go round and open the back door. So the devil has always his little sins to carry about with him to go and open back doors for him, and we let one in and say, 'O, it is only a little one.' Yes, but how that little one becomes the ruin of the entire man!

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

Even a little untruth destroys a man, as a drop of poison ruins milk.

We want to be saved from our misery, but not from our sin. We want to sin without misery, just as the prodigal son wanted inheritance without the father. The foremost spiritual law of the physical universe is that this hope can never be realized. Sin always accompanies misery. There is no victimless crime, and all creation is subject to decay because of humanity’s rebellion from God.

The reason for not going out and sinning all you like is the same as the reason for not going out and putting your nose in a slicing machine: its dumb, stupid, and no fun. Some individual sins may have pleasure still attached to them because of the residual goodness of the realities they are abusing: adultery can indeed be pleasant and tying one on can amuse. But betrayal, jealousy, love grown cold, and the gray dawn of the morning after are nobody's idea of a good time.

How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me

Where dance is, there is the devil.

People go around mourning the death of God; it's the death of sssin that bothers me. Without ssin, people aren't people any more, they're just ssoul-less sheep.