His manners are to 99 in 100 singularly repulsive --; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange. [...] he is, I verily believe, kindly-nature; is very of, attentive to, and patient with children; but he is jealous, gloomy, and of an irritable pride -- and addicted to women, as objects of sexual indulgence.
--
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Letter to Thomas Wedgwood, 1803, in Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E.L. Griggs (1932)William Hazlitt
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When we by Mercy of God and with His help accord us to Nature and Grace, we shall see verily that sin is in sooth viler and more painful than hell, without likeness: for it is contrary to our fair nature. For as verily as sin is unclean, so verily is it unnatural, and thus an horrible thing to see for the loved soul that would be all fair and shining in the sight of God, as Nature and Grace teacheth.
Julian of Norwich
Pride, ill nature, and want of sense, are the three great sources of ill manners.
Jonathan Swift
I … understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has primarily to do with distractions … Women's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life or saintly life.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh
By the time Verily was sixteen, a sturdy and rather good-looking young man of some education and impeccable manners, he had become a thoroughgoing skeptic. If the dogmas about witchery could be so hopelessly wrong, how could any of the teachings of the ministers be relied upon? It left Verily Cooper at loose ends, intellectually speaking, for all his teachers spoke as if religion were the cornerstone of all other learning, and yet all of Verily’s actual studies led him to the conclusion that sciences founded upon religion were uncertain at best, utterly bogus at worst.
Orson Scott Card
I have no patience with those who say that sexual excitement is shameful and that venereal stimuli have their origin not in nature, but in sin. Nothing is so far from the truth. As if marriage, whose function cannot be fulfilled without these incitements, did not rise above blame. In other living creatures, where do these incitements come from? From nature or from sin? From nature, of course. It must borne in mind that in the apetites of the body there is very little difference between man and other living creatures. Finally, we defile by our imagination what of its own nature is fair and holy. If we were willing to evaluate things not according to the opinion of the crowd, but according to nature itself, how is it less repulsive to eat, chew, digest, evacuate, and sleep after the fashion of dumb animals, than to enjoy lawful and permitted carnal relations?
Desiderius Erasmus
Hazlitt, William
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