Pastoral Resources

What is their potential for evil; what is their potential for wickedness? That's the only time that those characters become interesting to watch.

There is a method in man's wickedness; it grows up by degrees.

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed, by thought, word and deed.

Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.

It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong; the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.

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

The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.

If there is one realm in which it is essential to be sublime, it is in wickedness. You spit on a petty thief, but you can't deny a kind of respect for the great criminal.

Taste every fruit of every tree in the garden at least once. It is an insult to creation not to experience it fully. Temperance is wickedness.

In wickedness of pride is lost the light to understand how little grace is earned and how much given.

In morals what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

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.

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.

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion.

It is necessary for him who lays out a state and arranges laws for it to presuppose that all men are evil and that they are always going to act according to the wickedness of their spirits whenever they have free scope.

War contains so much folly, as well as wickedness, that much is to be hoped from the progress of reason.

According to this way of arguing, there will be no true principles in the world; for there are none but what may be wrested and perverted to serve bad purposes, either through the weakness or wickedness of men.

The proposition that we should encourage wickedness and violence by exposing one side of the face to blows because we have been beaten on the other is too great an absurdity.

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