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“I do not believe that there was in that genteel Bohemia an intensive culture of chastity, but I do not remember so crude a promiscuity as seems to be practised [sic.] in the present day.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence (New York: Penguin, 1944), 13.
“I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue [humility], but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it . . . There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride; disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive and will every now and then peep out and show itself.”
Cited in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003), 257.
“Repentance is a pure gospel grace. The covenant of works admitted no repentance; there it was, sin and die. Repentance came in by the gospel.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 13.
“In Adam we all suffered shipwreck, and repentance is the only plank left us after shipwreck to swim to heaven.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 13.
“It is one thing to be a terrified sinner and another to be a repenting sinner. Sense of guilt is enough to breed terror. Infusion of grace breeds repentance.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 15.
“True leaving of sin is when the acts of sin cease from the infusion of a principle of grace, as the air ceases to be dark from the infusion of light.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 17.
“Before a man can come to Christ he must first come to himself.”
Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1994, first published in 1668), 18.
“The least fracture now will be like a name engraved with the point of a pin on the tender rind of a young oak; the wound will enlarge with the tree, and posterity read it in full grown characters.”
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 2nd printing of Feb. 14, 1776 as edited by Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1986), 82.
“Thus necessity, like a gravitating power, would soon form our newly arrived emigrants into society, the reciprocal blessings of which, would supercede, and render the obligations of law and government unnecessary while they remained perfectly just to each other; but as nothing but heaven is impregnable to vice, it will unavoidably happen, that in proportion as they surmount the first difficulties of emigration, which bound them together in a common cause, they will begin to relax in their duty and attachment to each other; and this remissness, will point out the necessity, of establishing some form of government to supply the defect of moral virtue.”
Thomas Paine, Common Sense, 2nd printing of Feb. 14, 1776 as edited by Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1986), 66.
“The old doctrine is quite true you know – that one must attribute everything to the grace of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to be. My self satisfaction cannot be hidden from God, whether I express it to you or not: rather the little bit of self-satisfaction which I (probably wrongly) believe myself to be fighting against, is probably merely a drop in the bottomless ocean of vanity and self-approval which the Great Eye (or Great I) sees in me.”
Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 877; written to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 30 January, 1930.
