Thomas Browne, Religio Medici:
Were there any hopes to out-live vice, or a point to be super-annuated from sin, it were worthy of our knees to implore the dayes of Methuselah. But age doth not rectifie, but incurvate our natures, turning bad dispositions into worser habits, and (like diseases) brings on incurable vices; for every day as we grow weaker in age, we grow stronger in sinne, and the number of our dayes doth but make our sinnes innumerable. The same vice committed at sixteene, is not the same, though it agree in all other circumstances, at forty; but swels and doubles from the circumstance of our ages, wherein besides the constant and inexcusable habit of transgressing, the maturity of our Judgement cuts off pretence unto excuse or pardon: every sin, the oftner it is committed, the more it acquireth in the quality of evill; as it succeeds in time, so it proceeds in degrees of badnesse; for as they proceed they ever multiply, and like figures in Arithmeticke, the last stands for more than all that went before it: And though I thinke no man can live well once but hee that could live twice, yet, for my owne part, I would not live over my houres past, or beginne againe the thred of my dayes: not upon Cicero’s ground, because I have lived them well, but for feare I should live them worse; I find my growing Judgement dayly instructs me how to be better, but my untamed affections and confirmed vitiosity make mee dayly doe worse; I finde in my confirmed age the same sinnes I discovered in my youth; I committed many then because I was a child, and because I commit them still I am yet an Infant. Therefore I perceive a man may bee twice a child before the dayes of dotage, and stand in need of Aesons bath before threescore.