“We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vices are always bubbling up form it to bespatter and stain what is otherwise pure…. We should remember that we are not guilty of one offense only but are buried in innumerable impurities…. all human works, if judged according to their own worth, are nothing but filth and defilement…. they are always spattered and befouled with many stains…. it is certain that there is no one who is not covered with infinite filth.”

— John Calvin

In John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, 1989, William J. Bouwsma, Oxford University Press, USA, ISBN 0195059514 ISBN 9780195059519, p. 36. http://books.google.com/books?id=ADdQiBaLW_kC&pg=PA36&dq=%22We+take+nothing+from+the+womb+but+pure+filth+%22&hl=en&ei=iu9lTJbUNsL48AbKt92DCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22We%20take%20nothing%20from%20the%20womb%20but%20pure%20filth%20%22&f=false

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "We take nothing from the womb but pure filth [meras sordes]. The seething spring of sin is so deep and abundant that vi…" by John Calvin?

John Calvin 161

French Protestant reformer 1509–1564

Related quotes

“To live a pure unselfish life, one must count nothing as ones own in the midst of abundance.”

Gautama Buddha (-563–-483 BC) philosopher, reformer and the founder of Buddhism

“We fall from womb to tomb, from one blackness and toward another, remembering little of the one and knowing nothing of the other… except through faith.”

Stephen King book Danse Macabre

Source: Danse Macabre

“The worst thing about all this staining power of the world is the way in which we come to think of it as inevitable. … It is not true. … Social life is lighted up with the lustre of the white, unstained robes of many a pure man or woman who walks through its very midst.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

"Unspotted from the World"

“To him who has nothing it is forbidden not to relish filth.”

Samuel Beckett book Molloy

Molloy (1951)

“One of the other things that is going to help to give a boost to our economy is how we reform our state-owned enterprises. … The state-owned enterprises were sewers of corruption, a number of them. … There was rot, there was filth and there was deep corruption. We are rooting all that out right now.”

Cyril Ramaphosa (1952) 5th President of South Africa

At an ANC organized event in Johannesburg, as quoted by Amogelang Mbatha in Ramaphosa says state-owned companies are 'sewers of corruption' https://www.fin24.com/Economy/ramaphosa-says-sa-needs-extraordinary-measures-to-boost-growth-20180601, Bloomberg (1 June 2018)

“We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.”

Jeanette Winterson (1959) English writer

Source: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“The mind is everything. It is in the mind alone that one feels pure and impure. A man, first of all, must make his own mind guilty and then alone can he see another man's guilt.”

Sarada Devi (1853–1920) Hindu religious figure, spiritual consort of Ramakrishna

Women Saints of East and West

“Verily we know nothing. Truth is buried deep.”

Democritus Ancient Greek philosopher, pupil of Leucippus, founder of the atomic theory

Another translation: "Of truth we know nothing, for truth is in a well." Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers R.D. Hicks, Ed. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0004,001:9:11
Source Book in Ancient Philosophy (1907), The Fragments

“The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Chapter 4 : The Quest for Power, p. 38
Context: The order and harmony of the Western world, its most famous achievement, and a laboratory in which structures of a complexity as yet unknown are being fashioned, demand the elimination of a prodigious mass of noxious by-products which now contaminate the globe. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into the face of mankind.

“Through wind, hail or frost my living's made.
I am a lecher, and she's a lecher with me.
Which one of us is better? We're both alike:
The one as worthy as the other. Bad rat, bad cat.
We both love filth, and filth pursues us;
We flee from honor, honor flees from us,
In this brothel where we ply our trade.”

Francois Villon book Le Testament

Vente, gresle, gelle, j'ay mon pain cuit.
Ie suis paillart, la paillarde me suit.
Lequel vault mieulx? Chascun bien s'entresuit.
L'ung vault l'autre; c'est a mau rat mau chat.
Ordure amons, ordure nous assuit;
Nous deffuyons onneur, il nous deffuit,
En ce bordeau ou tenons nostre estat.
Source: Le Grand Testament (The Great Testament) (1461), Line 1621; "Ballade de la Grosse Margot (Ballade for Fat Margot)".

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

John Calvin 161

Related quotes

Related topics