Jean-Jacques Rousseau Quotes

Success achieved by the most contemptible means cannot but destroy the soul. ... It helps to cover up the inner corruption and gradually dulls one's scruples, so that those who begin with some high ambition cannot, even if they would, create anything out of themselves.

What the worm was to the corpse, his sins would be to the painted image on the canvas. They would mar its beauty, and eat away its grace. they would defile it, and make it shameful. And yet the thing would still live on. It would be always alive. (Dorian Gray regarding his portrait)

For this is the true strength of guilty kings, When they corrupt the souls of those they rule.

It is not the young people that degenerate; they are not spoiled till those of mature age are already sunk into corruption.

And it is to rock the soul and lead the person to immorality, corruption - to forget their prayers, to forget their God. And thus the world has partaken of the spirit of the Negro race, accepting their ways.

Negligence is the rust of the soul, that corrodes through all her best resolves.

Never will there be grief enough over the corruption of morals so extensively increasing and promoted by irreligious and obscene writings, theatrical spectacles and meretricious houses established almost everywhere; by other depraved arts and monstrous portents of every error disseminated in all directions; by the abominable impurities of all vices and crimes growing constantly and the deadly virus of unbelief and indifferentism spread far and wide; by contempt for ecclesiastical authority

There are souls which, crab-like, crawl continually toward darkness, going back in life rather than advancing in it, using what experience they have to increase their deformity, growing worse without ceasing, and becoming steeped more and more thoroughly in an intensifying wickedness.

Other sins find their vent in the accomplishment of evil deeds, whereas pride lies in wait for good deeds, to destroy them.

[F]alsehood of the tongue leads to that of the heart, and in time depraves all its good dispositions.

Whoever climbed the Lord's mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer.

. . . if gold rust, what then will iron do?/ For if a priest be foul in whom we trust/ No wonder that a common man should rust. . . .

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture.

No one every suddenly became depraved.

Ignorance is death. A closed mind is a catafalque.

The choking, sweltering, deadly, and killing rule of no rule; the consecration of cupidity and braying of folly, and dim stupidity and baseness, in most of the affairs of men. Slopshirts attainable three-halfpence cheaper by the ruin of living bodies and immortal souls.

When a religion or ideology becomes dominant, the lack of controls will result in widening spirals of license leading to degradation and corruption.

Selfishness is much more than an ordinary problem because it activates all the cardinal sins! It is the detonator in the breaking of the Ten Commandments.

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.

Consistency is the defense of a small mind

The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

But when Lust By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, But most by lewd and lavish arts of sin, Lets in defilement to the inward parts, The soul grows clotted by contagion, Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose The divine property of her first being.

There are some souls so base and filthy that they love gain and interest as noble souls love fame and virtue, knowing one pleasure only, that of making money or of not losing it; anxious and avid for their ten per cent; entirely preoccupied with what is owed them; forever concerned about the depreciation or discredit of money; buried, and as it were engulfed, amid contracts, title-deeds and parchments. Such people are neither parents, friends, citizens or Christians, nor, perhaps, even men; they merely have money.