How often when considering her character I have told myself that I was to blame for not understanding her, for not understanding that constant composure and complacency and lack of all interests or desires, and the whole secret lies in the terrible truth that she is a
depraved woman.
But howsoever these things are thus in men's
depraved judgments, and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making, or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.
Every living thing in the first place is composed of soul and body, of these the one is by nature the governor, the other the governed; now if we would know what is natural, we ought to search for it in those subjects in which nature appears most perfect, and not in those which are corrupted; we should therefore examine into a man who is most perfectly formed both in soul and body, in whom this is evident, for in the
depraved and vicious the body seems [1254b] to rule rather than the soul, on account of their being corrupt and contrary to nature.
What he said had a hateful truth in it, and another defect of my character is that I enjoy the company of those, however
depraved, who can give me a Roland for my Oliver.
It was a strange life, dark and tortured, in which men and women showed to remorseless eyes the evil that was in their hearts: a fair face concealed a
depraved mind; the virtuous used virtue as a mask to hide their secret vice, the seeming-strong fainted within with their weakness; the honest were corrupt, the chaste were lewd.
I saw a mind degraded by the practice of mean subterfuge, by the habit of perfidious deception, and a body
depraved by the infectious influence of the vice-polluted soul.
"Bear in mind that the culprit who comes under thy jurisdiction is but a miserable man subject to all the propensities of our
depraved nature, and so far as may be in thy power show thyself lenient and forbearing; for though the attributes of God are all equal, to our eyes that of mercy is brighter and loftier than that of justice.
Depraved as a girl, adulterous as a wife, an unnatural sister, homicide, poisoner, execrated by all who knew her, by every nation that had been visited by her, she died accursed by Heaven and earth."
An utterly, hopelessly
depraved nature was expressed in physical terms, that taken each separately had nothing positively startling.
"And if you retort that David is naturally a
depraved little boy, and so demands harsher measure, I have still my answer, to wit, what is the manner of severity meted out to him at home?
And finally she made a wicked plan to satisfy her
depraved appetite for pork.
"One may save anyone who does not want to be ruined; but if the whole nature is so corrupt, so
depraved, that ruin itself seems to be her salvation, what's to be done?"