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C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Lust

Light and lust are deadly enemies.

Shakespeare.

Lust—hard by hate.

Milton.

Nature is content with little; grace with less; but lust with nothing.

Matthew Henry.

The blood of youth burns not with such excess as gravity’s revolt to wantonness.

Shakespeare.

Any enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend, excepting lust, the indulgence of which increases its enmity.

Saadi.

  • The flesh being proud, Desire doth fight with Grace,
  • For there it revels, and when that decays,
  • The guilty Rebel for remission prays.
  • Shakespeare.

    So long as lust (whether of the world or flesh) smells sweet in our nostrils, so long we are loathesome to God.

    Colton.

  • Capricious, wanton, bold, and brutal Lust
  • Is meanly selfish; when resisted, cruel;
  • And, like the blast of Pestilential Winds,
  • Taints the sweet bloom of Nature’s fairest forms.
  • Milton.

    Lust is a captivity of the reason and an enraging of the passions. It hinders business and distracts counsel. It sins against the body and weakens the soul.

    Jeremy Taylor.

    Lust is, of all the frailties of our nature, what most we ought to fear; the headstrong beast rushes along, impatient of the course; nor hears the rider’s call, nor feels the rein.

    Rowe.

    I know the very difference that lies ’twixt hallowed love and base unholy lust; I know the one is as a golden spur, urging the spirit to all noble aims; the other but a foul and miry pit, o’erthrowing it in midst of its career.

    Fannie Kemble Butler.

  • Virtue, as it never will be moved,
  • Though Lewdness court it in a shape of Heav’n;
  • So Lust, though to a radiant angel link’d,
  • Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
  • And prey on garbage.
  • Shakespeare.

    As pills that are outwardly fair, gilt, and rolled in sugar, but within are full of bitterness: even so lustful pleasure is no sooner hatched but repentance is at hand, ready to supplant her.

    Daniel Cawdrey.

    Lust is an enemy to the purse, a foe to the person, a canker to the mind, a corrosive to the conscience, a weakness of the wit, a besotter of the senses, and finally, a mortal bane to all the body.

    Pliny.

  • Servile inclinations and gross love,
  • The guilty bent of vicious appetite;
  • At first a sin, a horror ev’n in bliss,
  • Deprave the senses and lay waste the man;
  • Passions irregular, and next a loathing
  • Quickly succeed to dash the wild desire.
  • Havard.

    It is the grand battle of life, to teach lust the limits of divine law, to break it into the taste of the bread of heaven, and make it understand that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that cometh out of the mouth of God.

    Rev. J. B. Brown.

  • But when lust,
  • By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
  • But most by lewd and lavish arts of sin,
  • Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
  • The soul grows clotted by contagion,
  • Imbodies and imbrutes, till she quite lose
  • The divine property of her first being.
  • Milton.

    Lust is a vice sooner condemned than banished; easily spoke against, but yet it will fawn as smoothly on our flesh as Circe on the Grecian travelers, when she detained them in the shape of beasts.

    W. Mason.