Life & Wisdom Quote by Francis Quarles

“Wickedness is its own punishment” lands like a moral law disguised as a proverb: you don’t need a judge, a prison, or even God’s thunderbolt to make evil costly. Quarles, a 17th-century English poet steeped in devotional literature, writes from a culture where sin wasn’t merely a private lapse but a metaphysical misalignment. The line’s power comes from how it collapses external consequence into internal corrosion. Wickedness doesn’t just invite punishment; it manufactures it, quietly, automatically, from the inside out.

The intent is partly pastoral. Quarles isn’t only condemning vice; he’s trying to make virtue feel like the most practical option. If wickedness contains its own penalty, then morality isn’t just obedience to authority, it’s self-preservation. That framing would have mattered in an era wracked by political instability and religious conflict, when outward justice was inconsistent and authority often looked compromised. If courts fail, conscience still bites. If the world is chaotic, the soul’s accounting remains.

The subtext is psychologically sharp: wrongdoing warps the doer. Guilt, paranoia, the need to keep lying, the slow deadening of empathy, the narrowing of pleasure into appetite and compulsion - these are punishments that don’t wait for a verdict. Quarles is also selling a kind of cosmic symmetry: the universe doesn’t merely record evil, it metabolizes it. Wickedness, in this view, is a trapdoor you build under your own feet.