captive thoughts

"We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ." ~2 Corinthians 10:5

"The casuists of the Romish Church, who gain by confession great opportunities of knowing human nature, have generally determined what it is a crime to do. It is a crime to think. Since by revolving with pleasure the facility, safety or advantage of a wicked deed, a man soon begins to find his constancy relax and his detestation soften, the happiness of success glistening before him, withdraws his attention from the atrociousness of the guilt, and acts are at last confidently perpetrated, of which the first conception only crept in the mind, disguised in pleasing complications, and permitted rather than invited.

No man has ever been drawn to crimes, by love or jealousy, envy or hatred, but he can tell how easily he might at first have repelled the temptation; how readily his mind would have obeyed a call to any other object; and how weak his passion has been after some casual avocation till he has recalled it again to his heart and revived the viper by too warm a fondness.

Such, therefore, is the importance of keeping reason a constant guard over imagination that we have otherwise no security for our own virtue, but may corrupt our hearts in the most recluse solitude with more pernicious and tyrannical appetities and wishes than the commerce of the world will generally produce; for we are easily shocked by crimes which appear at once in their full magnitude; but the gradual growth of our own wickedness, endeared by interest, and palliated by all the artifices of self-deceit, gives us time to form distinctions in our own favour, and reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye is in time accommodated to darkness." ~Samuel Johnson 

tranquility

"Since life itself is uncertain, nothing which has life for its basis can boasts much stability. Yet this is but a small part of our perplexity. We set out on a tempestuous sea, in quest of some port, where we expect to find rest but where we are not sure of admission; we are not only in danger of sinking on the way, but of being misled by meteors mistaken for stars, of being driven from our course by the changes of the wind, and of losing it by unskillful steerage; yet it sometimes happens that cross winds blow us to a safer coast, that meteors draw us aside from whirlpools, and that negligence or error contributes to our escape from mischiefs to which a direct course would have exposed us...

In this state of universal uncertainty, where a thousand dangers hover about us, and none can tell whether the good that he pursues is not evil in disguise, or whether the next step will lead him to safety or destruction, nothing can afford any rational tranquility but the conviction that, however we amuse ourselves with unideal sound, nothing in reality is governed by chance, but that the universe is under the perpetual superintendence of Him who created it; that our being is in the hands of omnipotent Goodness, by whom what appears casual to us is directed for ends ultimately kind and merciful; and that nothing can finally hurt him who debars not himself from the Divine favour." ~The Secret of Tranquility by Samuel Johnson

desperately wicked

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?" 

~Jeremiah 17:9 (KJV)

"We can form our opinions of that which we know not, only by placing it in comparison with something that we know. Whoever therefore is over-run with suspicion, and detects artifice and stratagem in every proposal, must either have learned by experience and observation the wickedness of mankind, and been taught to avoid fraud by having often suffered or seen treachery; or he must derive his judgement from the consciousness of his own disposition, and impute to others the same inclinations which he feels predominant in himself." ~Samuel Johnson

forgiveness

"The man who retires to meditate mischief and to exasperate his own rage--whose thoughts are employed only on means of distress and contrivances of ruin--whose mind never pauses from the remembrance of his own suffering, but to indulge some hope of enjoying the calamities of another--may justly be numbered among the most miserable of human beings, among those who are guilty without reward, who have neither the gladness of prosperity nor the calm of innocence.

Of him that hopes to be forgiven, it is indispensably required that he forgive. It is therefore superfluous to urge any other motive. On this great duty, eternity is suspended; and to him that refuses to practice it, the throne of mercy is inaccessible, and the Saviour of the world has been born in vain."  ~Samuel Johnson