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S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Immorality

When men of rank and fortune pass away their lives in criminal pursuits and practices they render themselves more vile and despicable than any innocent man can be, whatever low station his fortune and birth have placed him in.

Joseph Addison.

The readiest way to entangle the mind with false doctrine is first to entice the will to wanton living.

Roger Ascham.

Corrupt manners in living breed false judgment in doctrine: sin and fleshliness bring forth sects and heresies.

Roger Ascham.

Do we not see that slothful, intemperate, and incontinent persons destroy their bodies with disease, their reputations with disgrace, and their faculties with want?

Richard Bentley.

The inservient and brutal faculties controlled the suggestions of truth; pleasure and profit, overswaying the instructions of honesty, and sensuality perturbing the reasonable commands of virtue.

Is it not wonderful that base desires should so extinguish in men the sense of their own excellence as to make them willing that their souls should be like the souls of beasts, mortal and corruptible with their bodies?

Richard Hooker.

Through the want of a sincere intention of pleasing God in all our actions, we fall into such irregularities of life as, by the ordinary means of grace, we should have power to avoid.

William Law.

Could we but prevail with the greatest debauchees among us to change their lives, we should find it no very hard matter to change their judgments.

Robert South.

Nor could they have slid into those brutish immoralities of life had they duly manured those first practical notions and dictates of right reason which the nature of man is originally furnished with.

Robert South.

Whatever appears against their prevailing vice goes for nothing, being either not applied, or passing for libel and slander.

Jonathan Swift.

Men of dissolute lives cry down religion because they would not be under the restraints of it.

John Tillotson.