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A nice, calm and respectable lady went into the pharmacy, walked right up to the pharmacist, looked straight into his eyes, and said, "I would like to buy some cyanide." The pharmacist asked...

A man was dying and he called his wife to his bedside. He affectionately told her he loved her but he also had to confess something to her. “I haven’t been 100% faithful to you in our marriage. I’m so...

Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

I once heard a description of what meals are like in heaven. The saints are seated on either side of a four-foot-wide banquet table. The table is set with delicious foods on every plate. The only thin...

In Redeeming Productivity , Reagan Rose tells his own story to illustrate the two ways in which the idea that “it’s my life” leads to two very different and disordered outlooks on productivity. When ...

It was the Fall of 1914. This war was different from those that had come before. The invention of the machine gun, as well as other high-powered weapons, meant that armies could no longer charge thei...

Desire—eros, or erotic desire, to be more specific—kicked in pretty early in my life. I was often overwhelmed by a gnawing hunger and thirst I didn’t know how to handle. God bless my parents and my Ca...

In their book Friend and Foe, social psychologists Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer cite a study by Emory University scientist Frans de Waal regarding comparison. De Waal trained capuchin monkeys ...

In the mid-1980s, I helped facilitate a series of conferences between top Soviet and American policy advisers on the question of how to prevent a nuclear war. The times were tense and the accusations ...

Envy, the meanest of vices, creeps on the ground like a serpent.

The power of speech is unfathomable. Gossip can never be undone. It is cruel, divisive, and demeaning. It alters the way people see another person forever. It robs the victim of dignity and opportunit...

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

Shame is not just a consequence of something our first parents did in the Garden of Eden. It is the emotional weapon that evil uses to (1) corrupt our relationships with God and each other, and (2) di...

The wicked envy and hate; it is their way of admiring.

Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot an...

When I meet someone with whom I disagree, whom I dislike, or whom I find threatening, I can do one of four things. I can kill them, I can create a structure of coercion so I can control them, or I can...

O Lord, my every sense, member, faculty, affection, is a snare to me. I can scarce open my eyes but I envy those above me, or despise those below. I covet the honor and riches of the mighty, and a...

Almighty God, harsh words and personal attacks can bring out the worst in us. We find ourselves spending energy on thoughts of retaliation and plans to protect ourselves. Father forgive us. We long to...

Of all the deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and ...

As a moth gnaws a garment, so doth envy consume a man.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society must take the place of the victim, and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness.

Some people's affability is more deadly than the violence of coarser souls.

Despite all we know about shame, containing it, let alone disposing of it, is a bit like grasping for mercury: the more pressure you use to seize it, the more evasive it becomes . . . It is ubiquitous...

But what will not Ambition and Revenge Descend to? Who aspires must down as low As high he sor’d, obnoxious first or last To basest things.

William Shakespeare’s Othello is able to capture the heart of what it means to experience slander, or to have one “bear false witness’ perhaps better than any other: Who steals my purse steals trash;...

For though [something] be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately.

Never trust your tongue when your heart is bitter.

In his classic fictional work on spiritual warfare, The Screwtape Letters , C. S. Lewis imagined a senior demon (Screwtape) corresponding with one of his protégés (his nephew Wormwood) as the latte...

In the composition of the human frame there is a good deal of inflammable matter, however dormant it may lie for a time, and…when the torch is put to it, that which is within you must burst into blaze...