#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. ↗

— Carl Jung

#becomes #cannot #denied #evil #fact

I inquired what wickedness is, and I didn't find a substance, but a perversity of will twisted away from the highest substance – You oh God – towards inferior things, rejecting its own inner life and swelling with external matter. ↗

— Augustine of Hippo

#sin #wickedness #life

Melancholy and sadness are the start of doubt... doubt is the beginning of despair; despair is the cruel beginning of the differing degrees of wickedness. ↗

— Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

#cruel #degrees #despair #differing #doubt

After a sound drubbing followed by half a day's fasting, I felt more like laughing than like crying; and, in half a while, all was forgotten and my wickedness began afresh and worse than ever. ↗

— Stijn Streuvels

#after #began #crying #day #ever

When may a revival be expected? When the wickedness of the wicked grieves and distresses the Christian. ↗

— Billy Sunday

#distresses #expected #grieves #may #revival

I have a hundred times heard him say, that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind could devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. ↗

— John Stuart Mill

#wickedness #age

Are those paper clips?' I'd seen them in catalogs, but the pictures don't do them justice. They're beautiful, in an industrial sort of way. Eldric poured a clinking waterfall into my palm. 'Aren't they lovely! I can't keep my hands off them. But I give you fair warning: It was a box of paper clips that got me expelled.' 'Expelled?' 'A box of thousand paper clips,' he said, his long fingers curling, coiling, twisting. 'And a sack of colored glass.' 'Expelled!' I might be a wicked girl who'd think nothing of eating a baby for breakfast, but I'd never allow myself to get expelled. It's far too public. ↗

— Franny Billingsley

#beauty

Isn’t that the way God works? She’d thought. He takes the things in our lives that are ugly, disgusting, and downright wicked, and transforms them into something magnificent. ↗

— J.E.B. Spredemann

#god #grace #mercy #transformation #ugliness

I loathe, detest, hate and abominate the block, the gibbet, the rack, the pillory and the faggots with equal passion," said the old man vehemently. "Not only are they devilishly cruel but they are not even common sense. They do not lesson the evil in the world, they increase it, by making those who handle these cruelties as wicked as those who suffer them. No, I'm wrong, more wicked, for there is always some expiation made in the endurance of suffering and none at all in the infliction of it. ↗

— Elizabeth Goudge

#suffering #wickedness #equality

There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals. ↗

— Herman Melville

#devils #dignity #equals #hell #hell is