Gradual Downfall Quotes

The Jews did not go into darkness all at once. It was a gradual work, until they could not discern the gift of God in sending his Son.

For nothing is evil in the beginning.

Small crimes always precede great crimes. Whoever has been able to transgress the limits set by law may afterwards violate the most sacred rights; crime, like virtue, has its degrees, and never have we seen timid innocence pass suddenly to extreme licentiousness.

Nearly every grave moral failure begins with a small sin.

The Steps to Folly as well as Sin are gradual, and almost imperceptible, and when we are once on the Decline, we go down without taking notice on't.

You will say these are very small sins... [But] it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts

Sin rarely seems sin at first beginnings.

For twenty-seven years I was witness to the spiritual deterioration of my own father, watching day after day how everything human in him left him and how gradually he turned into a grim monument to his own self.

It is not the great temptations that ruin us; it is the little ones.

Funny how you dig yourself into a hole by the teaspoon.