“How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.”
Vol. 2, Ch. 10
Midnight Oil (1971)
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V.S. Pritchett 23
British writer and critic 1900–1997Related quotes

The Historical Illuminatus as spoken by Sigismundo Celine
Context: The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually — because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy is that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is "the Lie that all men believe."

Plain Facts for Old and Young, Burlington, IA: Segner & Condit, 1881, p. 428 https://books.google.it/books?id=pubVzCbD_DMC&dq=%22a+dreadful%22&focus=searchwithinvolume.

“The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.”
Source: Les Misérables

“How immense to us appear the sins we have not committed.”
Reported in Louis Klopsch, ed., Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations From the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896), p. 229.