Quotes about depravity

Some days you feel like you're the worst of sinners others like you're the most righteous person on earth. I am convinced that the former is when you're closest to God.

Every moment thou waitest does but increase thy misery thine attempts to plume thyself and make thyself fit for Jesus are all vanity.

If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There's none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved.

Sin is the native language in every ZIP code.

Violent crimes had increased from 120 per 100,000 in 1962 180 per 100,000 by 1964.

Malignant phenomena do not come out of a golden age.

A poem, novel, or play acquires all of humanity's disorders, including the fear of mortality

Why, since folly or perversity is expected of individuals, should we expect anything else from government?

Though the outside of human life changes much, the inside changes little.

Even the respectable have a small anarchist hidden on the inside.

Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.

Thou hast gone on in all thy life hitherto, ever since thou wast born, in a continual opposition to God Himself, unto the infinite Lord, the eternal first being of all the world; thy life hath been nothing but enmity to this God: thou hast as directly opposed, and striven against, and resisted Him, as ever man did oppose, and resist, and strive with another man, and this thou hast done in the whole course of thy life: certainly there is more in this to humble a man than anything that can be spok

All our good is apparently from God, because we are first naked and holy without any good, and afterwards enriched with all good.

God's revelation in the Gospel not only reveals Who He is, but it also reveals who we are.

Before we come to Christ, we must come to ourselves.

Cheer up! You're a worse sinner than you ever dared imagine, and you're more loved than you ever dared hope.

If I had a single wish, I would wish sixty seconds of total depravity upon myself. For one of the greatest gifts of all is to have ‘nothing’ so that I can finally learn how to appreciate ‘everything’.

The Russian people were just like us. They were victims of their own government. Ronald Reagan

The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart”.

What weighs us down is not gravity! A little force of kindness can decelerate depravity.

The men who are dropped in a jungle or a desert and expected video games and got mundanity and depravity and friends dying like animals.

The curse of the fall didn't affect only manual work, as we often seem to think. Excessive ambiguity that prevent us from figuring out how to navigate is really a form of confusion. Overload is one of the forms that frustration takes. The inordinate challenges we face in knowledge work can be traced to the fall just as much as the challenges in manual work. Send it especially lies behind the villain of lack of fulfillment. The reason we lack fulfillment is because we aren't fulfilling our true p

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

A life of hardship and personal suffering is unavoidable. A person must endure many humiliations of the mind and body, and expect persons whom they trusted to someday betray them. People inevitably witness the death of their loved ones. We also witness acts of depravity committed by criminals that lurk in every society and rouge acts of scandal committed by government officials in charge of the public welfare. A person must nonetheless resist personal discouragement, sadness, dejection, and desp

It is too easy to call the church political. The nature of fallen people is political. And they happen to make up the church. So the church is innately political. This cannot be helped. But it can be navigated if not always stomached.

I get it. I haven't seen much of the real world yet. But let's say I do get out there... and it turns out that it's not even worth seeing? Or even worse.. what if it's so ugly and cruel that I can barely stand to look? What if I only meet idiots and the depraved? What's that going to teach me? What can I learn from that?

There is good even in church people. You find it hard to believe, right? Jesus never shut the door on religious people. He just made sure that they understand He was that door, and not their deeds and tasks. Some of us, even I, need to be reminded of this. This being understood, the people of the church are like broken pieces of glass fixed into beautiful mosaic to reflect Jesus. The picture is beautiful, but the pieces do indeed still have sharp edges that can cut.

Kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.

Hysterical optimism will prevail until the world again admits the existence of tragedy, and it cannot admit the existence of tragedy until it again distinguishes between good and evil. . . Hysterical optimism as a sin against knowledge.

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

To Tom, the march of technology was equivalent to the march of civilization.

Our misconception in viewing the past lies in assuming that doubt and fear, permit, protests, violence and hate were not equally present.

One with God is always a majority. But many have been burned at the stake while the boats were being counted. Thomas Reed

As in a tree, there is more sap in an Arm of the tree, than in a little sprig; but the sprig hath the same sap for kind that the Arm of the tree hath, and it all comes from the same root. So though there be more venom in some gross, crying sins, than in some others; yet there is no sin but hath the same sap, and the same venom, for the kind, that every sin hath, that the worst sin hath.

If I turn mine eyes upon myself, I find myself a traitor with the rest;

It is well for us when prayers about our sorrows are linked with pleas concerning our sins—when, being under God's hand, we are not wholly taken up with our pain, but remember our offences against God.

Self-deprecation is the appropriate response of any new convert, as he matches his stained soul against the purity of God.

I am praying that the issues from the last 12 generations go into the ground with me so I have NEW issue is to pass on to my son.

Alas! it is but little we have done for our Master's glory. Our winter has lasted all too long. We are as cold as ice when we should feel a summer's glow and bloom with sacred flowers.

The shape of evil is much more superficiality and blindness than the usual list of hot sins. God hides, and is found, precisely in the depths of everything.

When man comes into the presence of God he will find, whether he wishes it or not, that all those things which seemed to make him so different from the men of other times, or even from his earlier self, have fallen off. He is back where he always was, where every man always is.

The last Bible I looked at contained over 2000 pages, and you humans managed to get yourself kicked out Paradise by page 5. That has to be some kind of record.

He trusted the cosmos – but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

On what grounds would God be told that He can bring death to millions of people at the end of a normal life span, but that He may not do it in any other way?

Her heart was revealed in a slip, as our hearts always are.

Our view of human problems determines who is qualified to speak to them. If sin is the primary human problem, then those with the theological and practical expertise in dealing with sin – in its varied and complex forms – should lead the way in the field of people-helping. Unless we have an accurate and robust conception of sin, the church will concede much of its work to outside professional and will be ill-equipped to cooperate with them when needed.

It is not, in Calvin’s view, that we sin because we believe the wrong things; it is, rather, that we believe the wrong things because we sin.

As for the vice of lust - aside from what it means for spiritual persons to fall into this vice, since my intent is to treat of the imperfections that have to be purged by means of the dark night - spiritual persons have numerous imperfections, many of which can be called spiritual lust, not because the lust is spiritual but because it proceeds from spiritual things. It happens frequently that in a person's spiritual exercises themselves, without the person being able to avoid it, impure movemen

Evil things are easy things: for they are natural to our fallen nature. Right things are rare flowers that need cultivation.

Sin has sprung from a royal though evil stock, and if it be in the heart, it will struggle for the throne.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful.

He that becomes protector of sin shall surely become its prisoner.

We owe God a "double debt" incurred by our passive receipt of Adam's debt but also by our active disobedience. The extent of our depravity is such that we also owe a "daring debt" because we challenge not only God's Law but His very grace as we blame Him that He has not done enough.

Our insight into the need of redemption will largely depend upon our knowledge of the terrible nature of the power that has entered our being.

If I created a new depravity I would be a priestess, while my imitators would founder, after my reign, in abominable filth...Don't you think that proud men, copying Satan, are more guilty than the Satan of the Bible, who invented pride? Is Satan not respectable because of his unprecedented and divinely inspired sin?

One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered.

Humanizing war?! You may as well talk of humanizing Hell. Sir John Fisher

No one can become and remain a theologian unless he is compelled again and again to be astonished at himself.

Poetry of World War I, at least in its lyrical mode, was itself the last flowering of the Age of Innocence that preceded the war, that the horrors of the trenches sparked the final blossoming, as friction gives rise to fire; that the daily nightmare unfolding before the soldiers sharpened their sense of beauty, prophecy, and mission.

It’s an act of our will to choose to see people simply as wildly loved by God, to assume their beauty before guessing their depravity.

The dream of all men is to meet little sluts who are innocent but ready for all forms of depravity—which is what, more or less, all teenage girls are.

we lived depravityand called it truth, silencingour dreaming, andour love, discardingthings holy.

You cannot change people but you can change the system so that people are not pushed into doing evil things.

The love of humanity does not prevent us from being good journalists.

The church is a whore, but she is still my mother. Augustine

I swung my hips around like I unscrewed at the waist.

Jesus takes the chaos of the world upon Himself.

Backward we are naturally to all good things, and it is a lesson of grace to learn to go forward in the ways of God.

When we get to Heaven, we can try a monarchy, perhaps." John Hay

Boasting about badness without actively involving in badness is mere madness.

A prison cell, in which one waits, hopes - and is completely dependent on the fact that the door of freedom has to be opened from the outside, is not a bad picture of Advent

Christmas is an indictment before it becomes a delight. It will not have its intended effect until we feel desperately the need for a Savior.

When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher.

True gospel preaching always changes the heart. It either awakens it or hardens it.

Without a heart transformed by the grace of Christ, we just continue to manage external and internal darkness.

Today. the celebration is for the "victorious", not the meritorious. The depiction to the youth, is that one can be victorious without merit, and that merit is less notable than victory. The result, is the masses are selectively and passively affirming that winning trumps hard work, that theft trumps the pride of ownership, and that personal success trumps collective progress.

Knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in him we find both God and our wretchedness.

How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.

Depravity and decadence are two sides of the same coin.

Modern Christians should not mistake our post-Victorian sense of propriety for moral purity.

God loves each person, I believe; although, just like we do in our private homes, He reserves His kingdom only for those whom He enjoys.

In the course of my life I have had pre-pubescent ballerinas; emaciated duchesses, dolorous and forever tired, melomaniac and morphine-sodden; bankers' wives with eyes hollower than those of suburban streetwalkers; music-hall chorus girls who tip creosote into their Roederer when getting drunk...I have even had the awkward androgynes, the unsexed dishes of the day of the *tables d'hote* of Montmartre. Like any vulgar follower of fashion, like any member of the herd, I have made love to bony and

I wonder if there is anyone who is not depraved. A wearisome thought.I want money. Unless I have it....In my sleep, a natural death!

Maybe the real miracle in any miracle is our ability to believe that despite our own depravity, in the eyes of God we are worthy of a miracle.

All the accounts of the burial of Jesus are somber, laced through with the silence of grief, the shock that violence does to one's soul, even experienced vicariously in the body of another who is loved. They are written as though they are dirges, laments hidden in the silences and spaces between the words.

A fair vision had welcomed him in this land of disease.

In a fallen world marked by human depravity and deep-seated sin, in a world where Hitler and Stalin had recruited millions of followers to commit mass murder, love must harness power and seek justice in order to have moral meaning. Love without power remained impotent, and power without love was bankrupt.

Initially, the God of the Old Testament might seem overwhelming and domineering to you, or tyrannical, or perhaps even evil, which is good. It is the first telling that God is indeed God, by sheer definition, and not some ear-tickling fairy by which one in his depravity is guaranteed to find another form of stale romanticism or love at first sight. For such a first impression as the latter would be problematic to the essence of Christianity. Therefore the Christians are right in saying that the

The ongoing struggle to achieve a profound harmony between the deepest and most conflicting impulses of human beings instates the murkiness of my soul. The battle against the amorphousness of sin and depravity, and seeking unity and clarity, trace their origins to the primeval fire that launched humanity. This ancient warfare for control of the soul allows me to create myself. Because of the primordial inconsistences between ecstasy and reason, I am the repentant artist of my being. I am a beard

If beauty is relative, then any and everything when compared to the beauty of God is absolutely hideous.

God's relationship with man does not work in a way in which man stumbles and then God has to drop what he is doing in order to lift him up; rather, man stumbles so that God can lift him up. Hence it is utterly impossible to truly diminish his glory.

What's simple is that everything good comes from God, and everything bad comes from man. Where it gets complicated is that everything seemingly good but ultimately bad comes from man, and everything seemingly bad but ultimately good comes from God.

...reclusiveness itself may be a kind of violence. It leaves an abyss for us to throw our fantasies into.

We often use the Bible as a source for personal validation and defense, a sidekick and a shield, but these will prove ineffective without first the other part. We must also allow ourselves to be wounded by it. We tend to forget its authority - that it is a double-edged sword. Our decrepit, depraved hearts must be completely ripped out in order to welcome that of God.

Sadly enough, some people are insecure in such a way that they cannot bear the thought of the sovereignty of God, the thought of His Being as greater than themselves. It makes them feel insignificant. But I know if I were to worship and obey anything, I would like it far greater than myself or any person or human system, preferably to the point that which it, perhaps, in all its majesty, makes me feel lost and even 'creatural' in my sheer humanity. Only this God - He who is great beyond human me