Depravity Of Man Quotes & Sayings

The seed of every sin known to man is in my heart. — Robert Murray McCheyne

According to Scripture, it was not man's flesh that fell into sin, but the whole man. The doctrine of total depravity means that the extent of the Fall is total, that every aspect of man's being is tainted by sin, and that the root of it is the 'heart' of man, in his mind, nature and being. To seek refuge in the spirit to escape from the flesh is to seek sanctity in the capitol of sin, for it was and is man's desire to be as God, to be his own god, determining good and evil for himself, which is the essence of original sin (Gen. 3:5). The ascetic quest thus took refuge in sin from sin! It flew from the suburbs of temptation into the central city of sin and was then bewildered to find the enemy there. — Rousas John Rushdoony

Nothing shall warp me from the belief that every man is a lover of truth. There is no pure lie, no pure malignity in nature. The entertainment of the proposition of depravity is the last profligacy and profanation. There is no skepticism, no atheism but that. Could it be received into common belief, suicide would unpeople the planet. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

One of the greatest crimes committed by this present Christian generation is its neglect of the gospel, and it is from this neglect that all our other maladies spring forth. The lost world is not so much gospel hardened as it is gospel ignorant because many of those who proclaim the gospel are also ignorant of its most basic truths. The essential themes that make up the very core of the gospel - the justice of God, the radical depravity of man, the blood atonement, the nature of true conversion, and the biblical basis of assurance - are absent from too many pulpits. Churches reduce the gospel message to a few creedal statements, teach that conversion is a mere human decision, and pronounce assurance of salvation over anyone who prays the sinner's prayer. — Paul David Washer

Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity? Ask yourself why. Ask yourself how long a country that did that could hope to exist, and whose moral standards have destroyed it. It was the only country in history where wealth was not acquired by looting, but by production, not by force, but by trade, the only country whose money was the symbol of man's right to his own mind, to his work, to his life, to his happiness, to himself. If this is evil, by the present standards of the world, if this is the reason for damning us, then we - we, the dollar chasers and makers - accept it and choose to be damned by that world. We choose to wear the sign of the dollar on our foreheads, proudly, as our badge of nobility - the badge we are willing to live for and, if need be, to die. — Ayn Rand

To me there's only one form of human depravity-the man without a purpose. — Ayn Rand

While devastation created by nature, such as wildfire, tornadoes, and hurricanes, can be far reaching and cause cataclysmic losses, the trauma that haunts our dreams and is the most feared is man-made. Acts of violence and depravity committed by one human being on another are personal in nature and leave those affected by them asking the questions, "Why did it happen to me?" or "Why did it have to happen at all?" With the advent of technology, the general public can view a new atrocity every day on the nightly news somewhere close to their community. — Karen Rodwill Solomon

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact. — Malcolm Muggeridge

The interplay of depravity here, as it relates to the prostitute's contribution, is in the wilful manoeuvring necessary to mirror the requests and requirements of a psychologically fragile male mind. Manipulation is quite necessary. In fact, with this type of man, it is mandatory; the ability to carry it out is simply a requirement of the job. This is not evidence of some sort of prostitutes' autonomy. It is evidence that this type of client must recognise in his 'mistress' the actions of a master manipulator. There is one reason for this: it arouses him. It is not, truly, at its core, about the woman being in control; it is about the man's need to perceive her to be. In — Rachel Moran

All this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us. — Nikolai Gogol

I do not know whether it came from his own innate depravity or from the promptings of his master, but he was rude enough to set a dog at me. Neither dog nor man liked the look of my stick, however, and the matter fell through. Relations were strained after that, and further inquiries out of the question. — Arthur Conan Doyle

It was his self-esteem she had sought to destroy, knowing that a man who surrenders his value is at the mercy of anyone's will; it was his moral purity she had struggled to breach, it was his confident rectitude she had wanted to shatter by means of the poison of guilt - as if, were he to collapse, his depravity would give her a right to hers. — Ayn Rand

Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man's depravity after the Fall and his need of salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul. — Bob Larson

The depravity which sin has produced in human nature extends to the whole of it. There is no part of man's nature which is unaffected by it. Man's nature is all of a piece, and what affects it at all affects it altogether — James Denney

Man's want of original righteousness and of holy affections toward God, and the corruption of his moral nature and his bias toward evil is called depravity — Henry Clarence Thiessen

The portions of a woman which appeal to man's depravity Are constructed with considerable care. — A.P. Herbert

You'd never get Burle to behave decently. When a man sank as low as that, the only thing to do was to throw a spadeful of mud over him and get rid of him like the rotting carcass of some poisonous beast. And even if you shoved his nose in his own shit, he'd only start again the next day and end up stealing a few sous to buy sticks of barley sugar for lice-ridden little beggar-girls. — Emile Zola

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. — C.S. Lewis

Nevertheless, let no one boast. Just as every man, though he be the greatest genius, has very definite limitations in some one sphere of knowledge, and thus attests his common origin with the essentially perverse and stupid mass of mankind, so also has every man something in his nature which is positively evil. Even the best, nay the noblest, character will sometimes surprise us by isolated traits of depravity; as though it were to acknowledge his kinship with the human race, in which villainy
nay, cruelty
is to be found in that degree. — Arthur Schopenhauer

It's only human,' you cry in defense of any depravity, reaching the stage of self-abasement where you seek to make the concept 'human' mean the weakling, the fool, the rotter, the liar, the failure, the coward, the fraud, and to exile from the human race the hero, the thinker, the producer, the inventor, the strong, the purposeful, the pure - as if 'to feel' were human, but to think were not, as if to fail were human, but to succeed were not, as if corruption were human, but virtue were not - as if the premise of death were proper to man, but the premise of life were not. — Ayn Rand

Indeed, we often so live as though we had no spirit in us, and the highest degree of human depravity is manifested by the fact that the spirit is completely stifled and the man becomes as though he were flesh alone. — John Of Kronstadt

The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained. — A.W. Tozer

I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death, that small motives will never be able to reconcile us to it; and though perhaps the situation of a man's health or fortune did not seem to require this remedy, we may at least be assured, that any one who, without apparent reason, has had recourse to it, was cursed with such an incurable depravity or gloominess of temper as must poison all enjoyment, and render him equally miserable as if he had been loaded with the most grievous misfortune. — David Hume

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like 'thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne', caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment. — Catharine Arnold

Only the man who extols the purity of love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love. — Ayn Rand

All change begins with a change of mind the Bible calls repentance. Repentance is detecting and destroying the rationalizations that led to me checking the sinful choice box in the first place. Repentance is what every biblical prophet was calling for because that is where a man begins to move from depravity to quality. Read the Old Testament and you'll notice the nonstop echo of calls for repentance. Ezekiel announced, Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. — James MacDonald

Close-viewed, their industry and function is that of dressing gracefully and eating sumptuously. As for their debauchery and depravity, it is perhaps unexampled since the era of Tiberius and Commodus. ( ... ) Such are the shepherds of the people: and now how fares it with the flock? With the flock, as is inevitable, it fares ill, and ever worse. They are not tended, they are only regularly shorn. They are sent for, to do statute-labour, to pay statute-taxes; to fatten battle-fields (named 'Bed of honour') with their bodies, in quarrels which are not theirs; their hand and toil is in every possession of man; but for themselves they have little or no possession. Untaught, uncomforted, unfed; to pine dully in thick obscuration, in squalid destitution and obstruction: this is the lot of the millions. — Thomas Carlyle

It is only against the pitch blackness of the night that we see the glory of the stars. And it is only against the pitch blackness of man's radical depravity that we can begin to see the glories of the gospel. — Paul David Washer

To what level of depravity has a society descended when it condemns a man simply because he is strong and great? — Ayn Rand

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. — George Eliot

Total depravity means the entire absence of holiness, not the highest intensity of sin. A totally depraved man is not as bad as he can be, but he has no holiness, that is, no supreme love of God — William Greenough Thayer Shedd

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. — Jeremiah Burroughs

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 spoken to shew him the evil of sin. — Jeremiah Burroughs

As one can hardly find any thing in a house where nothing keeps its place, but all is cast on a heap together; so it is in the heart where all things are in disorder, especially when darkness is added to this disorder: so that the hear t is like an obscure cave or dungeon, where there is but a little crevice of light, and a man must rather grope than see No wonder if men mistake in searching such a heat, sand so miscarry in judging of their estate (304). — Richard Baxter

Man in his raw, natural state as he comes from the womb is morally and spiritually corrupt in disposition and character. Every part of his being-his mind, his will, his emotions, his affections, his conscience, his body-has been affected by sin (this is what is meant by the doctrine of total depravity) — Robert L. Reymond

Every old man complains of the growing depravity of the world, of the petulance and insolence of the rising generation. — Samuel Johnson

Lord, lead me not into temptation, and when there leave me not there; for unless thou hold me fast I feel I must, I shall decline, and prove an apostate after all. There is enough tinder in the hearts of the best men in the world to light a fire that shall burn to the lowest hell, unless God should quench the sparks as they fall. There is enough corruption, depravity, and wickedness in the heart of the most holy man that is now alive to damn his soul to all eternity, if free and sovereign grace does not prevent. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

A small knowledge of human nature will convince us, that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle ... Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of all views of private interest, or advantage, to the common good. It is vain to exclaim against the depravity of human nature on this account; the fact is so, the experience of every age and nation has proved it and we must in a great measure, change the constitution of man, before we can make it otherwise. No institution, not built on the presumptive truth of these maxims can succeed. — George Washington

475Oh, if you were the kind of man I am ... I loved the shame of depravity. I loved cruelty ... In a word
a Karamazov! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The oppressive weight of disaster and tragedy in our lives does not arise from a high percentage of evil among the summed total of all acts, but from the extraordinary power of exceedingly rare incidents of depravity to inflict catastrophic damage, especially in our technological age when airplanes can become powerful bombs. (An even more evil man, armed only with a longbow, could not have wreaked such havoc at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. — Stephen Jay Gould

There is no such thing as a bottomless pit. If it were bottomless, it would not be a pit. The only thing that comes close to being a bottomless pit is the intrinsic depravity of mankind. — Ron Brackin