Quotes about sin
page 6

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

Source: Anna Karenina Notes

“It is leashed. Now drop the subject or I’ll tell Sin you’ve seen me naked. (Kat)
I will never bring this topic up again. Oh wait. What topic? I have Alzheimer’s. I know nothing at all. (Kish)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Waiting

“Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Letter to Fanny Guillermet (Zurich, 5 September 1918)

Reading

“Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Understanding, Problem, Thinking

“In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.”

Elizabeth Goudge (1900–1984) English fiction writer

Source: The Rosemary Tree

World, Spring, Tree, Singing

“Capitalism: Nothing so mean could be right. Greed is the ugliest of the capital sins.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto) (1990), Ch. 11 : Money Et Cetera, p. 100

“If Boeing got a big head start on the 707 from multibillion-dollar military contracts to develop an air force transport, is that a sin against free trade?”

Robert Kuttner (1943) American journalist

Source: The Economic Illusion (1984), Chapter 3, Trade, p. 96

“The present system of taking oaths is horrible. It is awfully absurd to make a man invoke God's wrath upon himself, if he speaks false; it is, in my judgment, a sin to do so.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

25 May 1830
Table Talk (1821–1834)

God, Falseness

“Fornication with your daughters thats like a double dog sin.”

Christopher Moore book Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal (2002)

Dogs, Daughters

“There was a time when I used to get lots of ideas… I thought up the Seven Deadly Sins in one afternoon. The only thing I've come up with recently is advertising.”

Peter Cook (1937–1995) British architect

Bedazzled (1967)

Idea, Time

“It had, perhaps, not been a very edifying life. On the booze in England, in India, in Malaya… And then a couple of gins for breakfast and then the first beers of the day in a kedai … He had been driven out of that Eden…because of his sinful desire to taste what was forbidden.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, Time for a Tiger (1956)

Life, Beer

“For long ages, too, no notice whatever was taken of the criminal’s “sin”; he was regarded as harmful, not guilty, and looked upon as a piece of destiny; and the criminal on his side took his punishment as a piece of destiny which had overtaken him, and bore it with the same fatalism … In general we may say that punishment tames the man, but does not make him “better.””

Georg Brandes (1842–1927) Danish literature critic and scholar

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), pp. 38-39

Age

“The solution of (1), which represents a homogeneous manifold, may be written in the form:ds^2 = \frac{d\rho^2}{1 - \kappa^2\rho^2} - \rho^2 (d\theta^2 + sin^2 \theta \; d\phi^2) + (1 - \kappa^2 \rho^2)\; c^2 d\tau^2, \qquad (2)where \kappa = \sqrt \frac{\lambda}{3}. If we consider \rho as determining distance from the origin… and \tau as measuring the proper-time of a clock at the origin, we are led to the de Sitter spherical world…”

Howard P. Robertson (1903–1961) American mathematician and physicist

"On Relativistic Cosmology" (1928)

World, Time

“But the greatest menace to our civilization today is the conflict between giant organized systems of self-righteousness—each system only too delighted to find that the other is wicked—each only too glad that the sins give it the pretext for still deeper hatred and animosity.”

Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) British historian

Christianity, Diplomacy and War (1953), p. 43.

“May those in distress become happy, May the sins of animate and inanimate beings disappear, may the evils of the universe be destroyed.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

At the conclusion of his speech on Indian tradition he recited a passage from Matsyapurana, quoted in "Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar".

Happiness, Universe, Evil, Animals

“Darkness is strong, and so is Sin,
But surely God endures forever.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

Villa Franca.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

God, Strong

“Every sin which a man does is without the body, but he that commits fornication sins against his own body.”

Paul of Tarsus book First Epistle to the Corinthians

1 Corinthians 6:18
First Epistle to the Corinthians

“Abstain rigorously from eating the flesh of cows and all beneficent animals, lest you be made to face a strict reckoning in this world and the next; for by eating the flesh of cows and other domestic animals, you involve your hand in sin, and thereby think, speak, and do what is sinful; for though you may eat but a mouthful, you involve your hand in sin, and though a camel be slain by another person in another place, it is as if you who eat its flesh had slain it with your own hand.”

Adurbad-i Mahrspandan Iranian philosopher

Sayings of Adarbad Mahraspandan, as quoted in Rachel MacNair, Religions and Nonviolence (2015), p. 88 https://books.google.it/books?id=KvL3CQAAQBAJ&pg=PA88, adapted from R. C. Zaehner, The Teachings of the Magi (1956), p. 110.

World, Thinking, Animals, Personality

“I find the world and all it contains extremely fascinating. Is this sinful?”

Robert Silverberg (1935) American speculative fiction writer and editor

Section 4
Short fiction, Nightwings (1968)

World

“When Satan attempts to draw you to sin by presenting God as a God all made up of mercy, oh then reply, that though God's general mercy extend to all the works of his hand, yet his special mercy is confined to those who are divinely qualified, to those who love him and keep his commandments, to those who trust in him, that by hope hang upon him, and who fear him; and that you must be such a one here, or else you can never be happy hereafter; you must partake of his special mercy, or else eternally perish in everlasting misery, notwithstanding God's general mercy.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

page 44
Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, 1652

Love, God, Happiness, Fear

“No Dilettantism in this Mahomet; it is a business of Reprobation and Salvation with him, of Time and Eternity: he is in deadly earnest about it! Dilettantism, hypothesis, speculation, a kind of amateur-search for Truth, toying and coquetting with Truth: this is the sorest sin. The root of all other imaginable sins. It consists in the heart and soul of the man never having been open to Truth; — "living in a vain show." Such a man not only utters and produces falsehoods, but is himself a falsehood. The rational moral principle, spark of the Divinity, is sunk deep in him, in quiet paralysis of life-death.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

Life, Death, Truth, Soul

“Mother told me always to follow the golden rule.
And she said it's really a sin to be mean and cruel.
So remember if you're untrue
Angels up in heaven are looking at you.”

Hal David (1921–2012) American lyricist

Song You'll Never Get To Heaven If You Break My Heart

Angels

“Three sacraments that contribute to life, baptism, confession, communion, have been used at Easter time. (Eucharist connects completely faith and baptism, God and man incompletely) Triumph: As expected of pious Christians, the joy of victory is heard in the midst of an unjust world; victory and not disparagement, insult, persecution. With the day of the victory of Christ, the Easter, the bonds are broken, the death and sin laid (?), and the Redeemer of mankind rises strongly the human race from night time and fetters, in blessed heights, heavenly gates!).”

Gregor Mendel (1822–1884) Silesian scientist and Augustinian friar

Excerpt from a sermon on Easter delivered by Mendel, found in Folia Mendeliana (1966), Volume 6, Moravian Museum in Brünn.
Original: Drei Sakramente, die das Leben spenden: Taufe, Beichte, Kommunion sind zur Osterzeit eingesetzt worden. (Eucharistie verbindet vollkommen, Glaube und Taufe unvollkommen dem Gottmenschen). Sieg: Wie mutet es einen frommen Christen an, mitten in der ungerechten Welt von Sieg zu hören, und nicht wieder Hintansetzung, Beschimpfung, Verfolgung; auch Siegesfreude. Mit dem Siegestag Christi, mit dem Ostertag, sind die Bande zerrissen, die der Tod und die Sünde aufgelegt ( ? ), und stark erhebt sich das Menschengeschlecht mit seinem Erlöser aus Nachtzeit und Fesseln in weite selige Höhen, himmlische Gefilde!).
Sermon on Easter

Life, Death, God, World

“I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. It is righteousness that exalteth a nation while sin is a reproach to any people.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech, "Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country" http://www.teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document=535, Syracuse, New York (September 24, 1847) 1840s, Love of God, Love of Man, Love of Country (1847)

People, Feeling, Lovers, Country

“A sinless God, for sinful men,
Descends to suffer and to bleed;
Hell must renounce its empire then;
The price is paid, the world is freed,
And Satan's self must now confess,
That Christ has earned a Right to bless”

Anne Brontë book Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), Music on Christmas Morning

Men, God, World, Hell

“Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed—go back with an open eye,
“And carry my word to the Sons of Men or ever ye come to die:
“That the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one—
“And the God that you took from a printed book be with you, Tomlinson!”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Tomlinson, l. 58-61.
Other works

Men, God, Books

“Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care;
The opening bud to heaven conveyed,
And bade it blossom there.”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Epitaph on an Infant
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Death

“The sin is yours, but the shame and sorrow are mine, the past I cannot retrieve, the future is still unspoiled and I will not embitter it by any willful sin. Before I was innocently guilty, now I should be doubly guilty if I went back to the 'gay free life I love.' Atone for the wrong you have done me by ceasing to tempt and trouble me. I will not yield, though you hunt me to death.”

Louisa May Alcott A Long Fatal Love Chase

A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866)

Love, Life, Death, Past

“Was there anything so loathsome as a wilfully innocent man? Hardly. An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.”

Toni Morrison book Tar Baby

Tar Baby (1981)

God, Angels

“Work, Mr. Burton. There’s nothing like work, for men and women. The one unforgivable sin is idleness.”

Agatha Christie book The Moving Finger

The Moving Finger (1942)

Women, Men

“As I understand it, the Holy Church teaches that there are two worlds: the world of everything we can see and hear and touch, and another world, the spiritual world of heaven and hell. Barnard and Stokes were two — how shall I put it — renegade theologians who postulated the existence of numerous other worlds like this one, neither heaven nor hell, but material and sinful. They are there, close by, but invisible and unreachable.”

Philip Pullman His Dark Materials trilogy

The Master of Jordan College to the Librarian, in Ch. 2 : The Idea of North
His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass (1995)

World, Hell, Understanding

“Nothing can be learned without mental exertion. If you are concerned in your further development, you will recognize the Christian word as to the curse of work as untrue. Work cannot be descended from sin, for it is a blessing. You will have experienced in yourself how elated one feels after successful physical or mental work.”

Joseph Dietzgen (1828–1888) german philosopher

Letter 1
Letters on Logic: Especially Democratic-Proletarian Logic (1906)

Feeling, Learning, Success

“Once efficiency is universally accepted as a rule, it becomes an inner compulsion and weighs like a sense of sin, simply because no one can ever be efficient enough, just as no one can ever be virtuous enough. And this new sense of sin only contributes further to the enervation of leisure, for the rich as well as the poor.The difficulty of carrying on a leisure-oriented tradition of culture in a work-oriented society is enough in itself to keep the present crisis in our culture unresolved.”

Clement Greenberg (1909–1994) American writer and artist

"The Plight of Culture" (1953), pp. 31-32
1960s, Art and Culture: Critical Essays, (1961)

Sense, Universe

“Remorse is the pain of sin.”

Theodore Parker (1810–1860) abolitionist

As quoted in Man a revelation of God (1888) by George Everett Ackerman, p. 254.

Pain

“[T]he whole purpose of the Torah is to correct the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, which induced the confusion of the conduct of the sustenance of reality.”

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

Assorted Themes, On Torah

Knowledge, Reality, Tree

“The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves – our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.”

Tryon Edwards (1809–1894) American theologian

Source: A Dictionary of Thoughts, 1891, p. 517.

Error

“God gave His laws to Moses… and like it or not, God condemns the sin of homosexuality.”

Jack T. Chick (1924–2016) Christian comics writer

Chick tracts, " Doom Town http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0273/0273_01.asp" (1991)

God, Law

“My lover took away my robe of sin and I let it fall, rejoicing; then he plucked at my robe of virtue, but I was ashamed and alarmed and prevented him. It was not till he wrested it from me by force that I saw how my soul had been hidden from me.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Bhakti

Soul, Lovers

“A sin that's hidden is half forgiven.”

Giovanni Boccaccio book The Decameron

Peccato celato e mezzo perdonato. First Day, Introduction J. M. Rigg's translation http://decameron.obdurodon.org/engdecameronviewreading.html: Sin that is hidden is half forgiven. The Decameron (c. 1350)

“You may not hold me guilty of sins committed in dreams.”

Robert Silverberg book A Time of Changes

Source: A Time of Changes (1971), Chapter 8 (p. 25)

Dreams

“Where charity keeps pace with grain, industry is blessed, but to slave to get, and keep it sordidly, is a sin against Providence, a vice in government and an injury to their neighbours.”

William Penn (1644–1718) English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker and founder of the Province of Pennsylvania

218
Fruits of Solitude (1682), Part II

“The prophets were not religious individualists. …they always dealt with Israel and Judah as organic totalities. They conceived of their people as a gigantic personality which sinned as one and ought to repent as one. …it was only when the national life of Israel was crushed by foreign invaders that the prophets began to address themselves to the individual life and lost the large horizon of public life.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Ch.1 The Historical Roots of Christianity the Hebrew Prophets, p. 8-9

Life, People, Personality

“If ye never had a sick night and a pained soul for sin, ye have not yet lighted upon Christ.”

Samuel Rutherford (1600–1661) Scottish Reformed theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 594.

Pain, Soul, Light, Christ

“There is no such thing as a secret among our leaders; communication is very open and honest, and if it's not, then it can become seemingly brutal. You've heard my arguments for love, friends, and authenticity, but there are the deceivers, the manipulators, the control freaks, and the self-appointed teachers in the Body who would love to use our system for their own selfish purposes. We all know the realities of the old sin nature.”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

[Haggard, Ted, Dog Training, Fly Fishing, And Sharing Christ In The 21st Century: Empowering Your Church To Build Community Through Shared Interests, Nelson Books, May 14, 2002, p. 154, ISBN 0785265147]

Love, Secret, Communication, Nature

“Because free countries have affirmed many years ago that a compulsory church rate is immoral and oppressive, for the sake of the burden laid upon individual consciences; and in affirming this truth they have unconsciously affirmed the wider truth, that every tax or rate, forcibly taken from an unwilling person, is immoral and oppressive. The human conscience knows no distinction between church rates and other compulsory rates and taxes. The sin lies in the disregarding of each other's convictions, and is not affected by the subject matter of the tax.”

Auberon Herbert (1838–1906) British politician

The Principles of Voluntaryism and Free Life

Truth, Personality, Country

“There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.”

Samuel Butler book The Way of All Flesh

Source: The Way of All Flesh (1903), Ch. 26

People, World

“There is nothing like a naturalistic orientation to dispel all these morbid thoughts of "sin" and "free will" and "moral responsibility."”

Raymond Smullyan (1919–2017) American mathematician

Is God a Taoist? (1977)

“The whole history of Israel, its ritual and its government, is explicable only as it is typical of the spiritual Israel, of the sacrifice on Calvary, of the precious blood which alone can wash away sin.”

Abbott Eliot Kittredge (1834–1912) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 69.

History

“A man may as certainly miscarry by his seeming righteousness and supposed graces, as by gross sins; and that is, when a man doth trust in these as his righteousness before God, for the satisfying His justice, appeasing His wrath, procuring His favor, and obtaining his own pardon.”

Joseph Alleine (1634–1668) Pastor, author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 540.

God, Justice

“He will reprove the world of sin" —not because men swear and lie and steal and get drunk and murder— "of sin because they believe not on me.”

Dwight L. Moody (1837–1899) American evangelist and publisher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 607.

Men, Lie, World

“If you believe in the sinfulness of the world, for instance, then you will search out from normal sense data those facts that confirm your belief. But beyond that, at other levels you also organize your mental world in such a way that attracts to yourself events that - again - will confirm your beliefs.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 833, Page 163
The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, (1981)

World, Way, Search, Sense

“The Sin Washer had died centuries ago, and His legacy seemed often to be in the accumulation of connections and power more than the distribution of emotional or spiritual ease. She kept that thought to herself. Wisdom came in many forms, and silence was often the most useful.”

Laura Anne Gilman book Flesh and Fire

Source: Flesh and Fire (2009), p. 96

Wisdom, Silence

“I will take the Government of the United States, and the laws of Missouri and Illinois, from the year 1833 to 1845, and if they had been carried out according to their letter and spirit, they would have strung up the murderers and mobocrats who illegally and unrighteously killed, plundered, harassed, and expelled us. I will tell you how much I love those characters. If they had any respect to their own welfare, they would come forth and say, whether Joseph Smith was a Prophet or not, "We shed his blood, and now let us atone for it;" and they would be willing to have their heads chopped off, that their blood might run upon the ground, and the smoke of it rise before the Lord as an incense for their sins. I love them that much. But if the Lord wishes them to live and foam out their sins before all men and women, it is all right, I care not where they go, or what they do.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 2:186 (Feb. 18, 1855)
Young's response to those that persecuted the Mormons in Missouri and Illinois.
1850s

Love, Women, Men, Law

“A crime, which, though perhaps not considered by law as the highest, is in truth and in fact, the blackest sin, which can contaminate the hands, or pollute the soul of man.”

Henry Fielding (1707–1754) English novelist and dramatist

Fielding, Henry; ed. by William Ernest Henley. 1903. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq: Miscellaneous writings. W. Heinemann. p. 162

Truth, Law, Soul

“How much is your sin going to cost me?”

Ted Haggard (1956) American minister

http://web.archive.org/web/20060509115906/http://www.preachingtodaysermons.com/hatedhowmuis.html, popular sermon on how the consequences of our sin affect others, accessed 4 November 2006.

“Thou sorrow, venom Elfe.
Is this thy play,
To spin a web out of thyselfe
To Catch a Fly?
For Why?
[…]
To tangle Adams race
In's stratigems
To their Destructions, spoil'd, made base
By venom things
Damn'd Sins.”

Edward Taylor (1642–1729) American poet

"Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" St. 1 & 8

Flying

“As Christ's ministry drew to its close, its severity and its gentleness both increased; its severity to the class from whom it never turned away. Side by side through all His manifestations of Himself, there were the two aspects: "He showed Himself froward " (if I may quote the word) to the self-righteous and the Pharisee; and He bent with more than a woman's tenderness of 'yearning love over the darkness and sinfulness, which in its great darkness dimly knew itself blind, and in its sinfulness stretched out a lame hand of faith, and groped after a Divine deliverer.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 68.

Love, Faith, Quotes, Christ

“Apart from sin we have nothing of which to be ashamed. Only an evil desire to shine makes us want to appear other than we are.”

Aiden Wilson Tozer (1897–1963) American missionary

The Pursuit of God (1957)

Appearance, Evil

“Forgiveness: Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”

Marlene Dietrich (1901–1992) German-American actress and singer

Marlene Dietrich's ABC https://books.google.com/books?id=u7x5UYHMs0IC&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Marlene+intitle:Dietrich%27s+intitle:abc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjv7qiV8cPfAhWinuAKHcZLAWQQ6AEIKjAA#v=snippet&q=forgiveness&f=false (1962)

“There are a disproportionate amount of assaults against children by homosexuals than by heterosexuals, you can't deny that. And the reason is very clear: homosexuality is perverse. It represents a degradation of a person's mind and if a person will sink that low and there are no restraints from God's law, then there is no telling to whatever sins he will commit as well.”

Robert Jeffress (1955) Pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas

God, Children, Law, Personality

“Though sin may be in the Christian, yet it hath no more dominion over him; he hath an unfeigned respect to all God's commandments, making conscience even of little sins and little duties.”

Joseph Alleine (1634–1668) Pastor, author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 551.

God

“To regret your sins of commission as much as your sins of omission is to prove yourself a most unworthy sinner.”

Elizabeth Bibesco (1897–1945) writer, actress; Romanian princess

Haven (1951)

“They tried to say that being gay is a sin, and I said that adultery is a sin. Adultery is responsible for breaking up more marriages, but do we put that in the Constitution? It’s absurd.”

Al Sharpton (1954) American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and television/radio talk show host

Remarks announcing the National Action Network anti-homophobia campaign, quoted in Jamal Watson (3 August 2005) "Sharpton Pledges Fight Against Homophobia Among Blacks" New York Sun.

Marriage

“This is the understanding of this word: — That it shall be done for me, meaneth that it shall be done for the general Man: that is to say, all that shall be saved. It shall be worshipful and marvellous and plenteous, and God Himself shall do it; and this shall be the highest joy that may be, to behold the deed that God Himself shall do, and man shall do right nought but sin. Then signifieth our Lord God thus, as if He said: Behold and see! Here hast thou matter of meekness, here hast thou matter of love, here hast thou matter to make nought of thyself, here hast thou matter to enjoy in me; — and, for my love, enjoy in me: for of all things, therewith mightest thou please me most.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 36

Love, God, Understanding, Joy

“In this I saw matter of mirth and matter of moaning: matter of mirth: for our Lord, our Maker, is so near to us, and in us, and we in Him, by sureness of keeping through His great goodness; matter of moaning: for our ghostly eye is so blind and we be so borne down by weight of our mortal flesh and darkness of sin, that we may not see our Lord God clearly in His fair Blissful Cheer. No; and because of this dimness scarsely we can believe and trust His great love and our sureness of keeping. And therefore it is that I say we may never stint of moaning nor of weeping. This "weeping" meaneth not all in pouring out of tears by our bodily eye, but also hath more ghostly understanding. For the kindly desire of our soul is so great and so unmeasurable, that if there were given us for our solace and for our comfort all the noble things that ever God made in heaven and in earth, and we saw not the fair Blissful Cheer of Himself, yet we should not stint of moaning nor ghostly weeping, that is to say, of painful longing, till when we see verily the fair Blissful Cheer of our Maker. And if we were in all the pain that heart can think and tongue may tell, if we might in that time see His fair Blissful Cheer, all this pain should not aggrieve us.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Sixteenth Revelation, Chapter 72

Love, God, Pain, Soul

“Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, says, ‘Since the world is judged by its majority, and the individual is judged by the majority, if he performs one Mitzva, happy is he, for he has sentenced himself and the whole world to a scale of merit. If he commits one sin, woe unto him, for he has sentenced himself and the whole world to a scale of sin.’ (…) Moreover, it is written, “one sinner destroyeth much good.””

Yehuda Ashlag (1886–1954) Orthodox Jewish Rabbi and Kabbalist

This is because one sin sentences the person and the entire world to a scale of sin.
Selected Articles

Happiness, World, Personality

“To confess your sins to God is not to tell God anything God doesn't already know. Until you confess them, however, they are the abyss between you. When you confess them, they become the Golden Gate Bridge.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (1973)

God

“To those who doubt and deny the preponderance of good over evil in human nature; who think the few are made to rule, and the many to serve; who put rank above brotherhood, and race above humanity; who attach more importance to ancient forms than to the living realities of the present; who worship power in whatever hands it may be lodged and by whatever means it may have been obtained; our government is a mountain of sin, and, what is worse, it seems confirmed in its transgressions. One of the latest and most potent European prophets, one who felt himself called upon for a special deliverance concerning us and our destiny as a nation, was the late Thomas Carlyle. He described us as rushing to ruin, and when we may expect to reach the terrible end, our gloomy prophet, enveloped in the fogs of London, has not been pleased to tell us. Warning and advice from any quarter are not to be despised, and especially not from one so eminent as Mr. Carlyle; and yet Americans will find it hard to heed even men like him, while the animus is so apparent, bitter and perverse.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Mountain, Nature, Thinking

“I myself am pursuing the same instinctive course as the veriest human animal you can think of — I am, however young, writing at random — straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness — without knowing the bearing of any one assertion, of any one opinion. Yet may I not in this be free from sin?”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Letter to George and Georgiana Keats (March 19, 1819)
Letters (1817–1820)

Thinking, Light, Animals

“It iz comparitively eazy tew repent ov the sins that we hav committed, but tew repent ov thoze which we intend to commit, is asking tew mutch ov enny man, now days.”

Josh Billings (1818–1885) American humorist

Affurisms: Jews Harps http://books.google.com/books?id=pkM1AAAAMAAJ&q=%22It+iz+comparitively+eazy+tew+repent+ov+the+sins+that+we+hav+committed+but+tew+repent+ov+thoze+which+we+intend+to+commit+is+asking+tew+mutch+ov+enny+man+now+days%22&pg=PA164#v=onepage, Josh Billings' Wit and Humor (1874)

“In private prayer we have a far greater advantage as so the exercise of our own gifts and graces and parts that we have in public…in public duties we are more passive, but in private duties we are more active. Now, the more our gifts and parts and graces are exercised, the more they are strengthened and increased. All acts strengthen habits. The more sin is acted, the more it is strengthened. And so it is with our gifts and graces; the more they are acted, the more they are strengthened.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

The Secret Key To Heaven, 1665

Exercises, Parting

“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 10

Problem

“Joanna (Lady of Wales): Mama… why do I not look like you? Why do I have hair black like a crow?
Clemence: Because you take after him. That was all I asked of God, that I need not see him each time I looked into your face. Little enough to ask, I should think. But we do pay and pay for our sins, it seems, and you grow more like him with each day that passes.”

Sharon Kay Penman book Here Be Dragons

Here Be Dragons (1985), Book 1

God, Thinking, Time

“To create a public scandal is what's wicked;
To sin in private is not a sin.”

Molière book Tartuffe

Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l'offense,
Et ce n'est pas pécher que pécher en silence.
Act IV, sc. v
Tartuffe (1664)

“I would never say that God used Hitler to punish the Jews. If God treated any of us justly and punished us according to our sins, we would all be in Hell in an instant. I'm Jewish and I am as guilty as any Gentile of violating His law. However, you and I get to stay alive for a time because God is rich in mercy, is filled with what the Bible calls "lovingkindness," and He particularly lavished this loving-kindness upon the Jewish nation. If you study the Scriptures, you will see that He promised them that if they loved and obeyed Him He would give them long life, health, prosperity, and protection from their enemies. But He also warned that if they disobeyed Him, His hand of protection would be removed.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Defender's Guide for Life's Toughest Questions (2011)

Love, Life, God, Health

“Thousands of pulpit orators have swayed their audiences as a wind sways standing corn; but in the result, those who were most affected differed nothing from their former selves. An effect of eloquence is sufficient to account for a vast amount of feeling at the moment; but to trace to this a moral power, by which a man, for his life long, overcomes his besetting sins, and adorns his name with Christian virtues, is to make sport of human nature.”

William Arthur (minister) (1819–1901) Wesleyan Methodist minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 322.

Life, Feeling, Nature, Sport

“Why should our garments, made to hide
Our parents' shame, provoke our pride?
The art of dress did ne'er begin,
Till Eve our mother learn'd to sin.

When first she put the covering on,
Her robe of innocence was gone;
And yet her children vainly boast
In the sad marks of glory lost.”

Isaac Watts (1674–1748) English hymnwriter, theologian and logician

Song 22: "Against Pride in Clothes".
1710s, Divine Songs Attempted in the Easy Language of Children (1715)

Children, Sadness, Art, Parent

“To receive the gift of eternal life, you must repent of your sins (turn from them), and put on the Lord Jesus Christ as you would put on a parachute— trusting in Him alone for your salvation. That means you forsake your own good works as a means of trying to please God (trying to bribe Him), and trust only in what Jesus has done for you. Simply throw yourself on the mercy of the Judge. The Bible says that He’s rich in mercy to all who call upon Him, so call upon Him right now. He will hear you if you approach Him with a humble and sorrowful heart. Do it right now because you don’t know when you will take that leap through the door of death. Confess your sins to God, put your trust in Jesus to save you, and you will pass from death to life. You have God’s promise on it.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Life, Death, God, Heart

“I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.
I have contracted. I have eased
My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.
I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized
Your luck
And your lives from your unfinished reach,
If I stole your births and your names,
Your straight baby tears and your games,
Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,
and your deaths,
If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,
Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

The Mother (1945)

Love, Death, Marriage, Children

“The ports of death are sins; of life, good deeds:
Through which our merit leads us to our meeds.
How willful blind is he then, that would stray,
And hath it in his powers, to make his way!
This world death's region is, the other life's:
And here, it should be one of our first strifes,
So to front death, as men might judge us past it.
For good men but see death, the wicked taste it.”

Ben Jonson (1572–1637) English writer

LXXX, Of Life and Death, lines 1-8
The Works of Ben Jonson, First Folio (1616), Epigrams

Life, Death, Men, World

“The religion of hinduism says that if you’ve been bad, you may come back as a rat or some other animal. If you’ve been good, you might come back as a prince. But that’s like someone saying, “when you jump out of the plane, you’ll get sucked back in as another passenger. If you’ve been bad, you go down to the Economy Class; if you’ve been good, you go up to First Class.” It’s an interesting concept, but it doesn’t deal with your real problem of having sinned against God and the reality of hell.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

God, Religion, Hell, Problem

“The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book III, Chapter 5, "Sexual Morality"
Mere Christianity (1952)

People, Pleasure, Hell, Sport

“I think the greatest sin in the world is bringing children into the world that have disease from their parents, that have no chance to be a human being, practically. Delinquents, prisoners, all sorts of things just marked when they're born. That to me is the greatest sin — that people can — can commit.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

The Mike Wallace Interview (ABC) http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/sanger_margaret_t.html, Posed question: "Do you believe in sin — When I say "believe" I don't mean believe in committing sin, do you believe there is such a thing as a sin

Children, People, World, Disease

“In the licorice fields at Pontefract
My love and I did meet
And many a burdened licorice bush
Was blooming round our feet;
Red hair she had and golden skin,
Her sulky lips were shaped for sin,
Her sturdy legs were flannel-slack'd
The strongest legs in Pontefract.”

John Betjeman (1906–1984) English poet, writer and broadcaster

"The Licorice Fields at Pontefract" from A Few Late Chrysanthemums.
Poetry

Love

“As a believer is changed, receiving a glorified body, so similarly, the earth is changed into a new earth, unstained by sin.”

Paul P. Enns (1937) American theologian

Source: Heaven Revealed (Moody, 2011), p. 97

Change

“A person can perhaps succeed in hiding his sins from the world, he can perhaps be foolishly happy that he succeeds, or yet, a little more honest, admit that it is a deplorable weakness and cowardliness that he does not have the courage to become open-but a person cannot hide his sins from himself. P. 182”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

1850s, Two Discourses at Friday Communion (August 1851)

Happiness, World, Courage, Personality

“Priests, theologians, have taken advantage of women—of their gentleness—their love of approbation. They have lived upon their hopes and fears. Like vampires, they have sucked their blood. They have made them responsible for the sins of the world. They have taught them the slave virtues—meekness, humility—implicit obedience. They have fed their minds with mistakes, mysteries and absurdities. They have endeavored to weaken and shrivel their brains, until, to them, there would be no possible connection between evidence and belief—between fact and faith.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

A Thanksgiving Sermon (1897)

Love, Women, World, Fear

“Lo, this great work, a Temple to thy praise,
On polisht Pillars of strong Verse I raise!
A Temple, where if Thou vouchsafe to dwell,
It Solomons, and Herods shall excel.
Too long the Muses-Land have Heathen bin;
Their Gods too long were Dev'ils, and Vertues Sin;
But Thou, Eternal Word, hast call'd forth Me
Th' Apostle, to convert that World to Thee;”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

Book I, lines 33-40
Davideis (1656)

God, World, Strong

“Disciple: Lord, what is true detachment?
Truth: Take note with careful discrimination of these two words: oneself and leave. If you know how to weigh these two words properly, testing their meaning thoroughly to their core and viewing them with true discernment, then you can quickly grasp the truth.
Take, first of all, the first word -- oneself or myself -- and see what it is. It is important to realize that everyone has five kinds of self. The first self we have in common with a stone, and this is being. The second we share with plants, and this is growing. The third self we share with animals, and this is sensation. The fourth we share with all other human beings: we possess a common human nature in which all are one. The fifth - which belongs to a person exclusively as his or her own - is one's individual human self…
Now what is it that leads people astray and robs them of happiness? It is exclusively this last self. Because of it a person turns outward, away from God and toward this self, when he or she should be returning inward. Thus they fashion their own selves according to what is accidental. In their blindness they appropriate to themselves what is God's. This is the direction they take, and they eventually sink into sinfulness.”

Henry Suso (1295–1366) Dominican friar and mystic

The Exemplar, The Little Book of Truth

God, Happiness, People, Truth

“Sometimes I pick up a magazine and read a piece of film criticism — to the end only if I like it. I don't like those which are too free with praise because their reasons seem wrong and that annoys me. Critics who attack me do so for such contradictory reasons that they confuse me, and I am afraid that if I am influenced by one, I will sin according to the standards of the other.”

Michelangelo Antonioni (1912–2007) Italian film director and screenwriter

Encountering Directors interview (1969)

Reading

“One of the temptations of upper-middle class life is to create sharp edges of our moral sensitivities and allows a comfortable confusions about sin and virtue. The difference between rich and poor is not that the rich sin is more than the poor, that the rich find it easier to call sin a virtue. When the poor sin, they call it sin; when they see holiness, they identify it as such. The intuitive clarity is often absent from the wealthy, and that absence easily leads to the atrophy of the moral sense.”

Henri Nouwen (1932–1996) Dutch priest and writer

Encounters with Merton

Life, Sense

“His walk and conversation will then be very different from his former course of life, when he willingly served sin and Satan, indulged his evil desires, and walked after the course of this world.”

Hermann Friedrich Kohlbrügge (1803–1874) Dutch minister

Source: Sermons on the First Epistle of Peter (1855), p. 6

Life, World, Evil

“Besides
what have poets, in any case, to do with sin?
They must dance before the Ark of the Covenant
or die! But what am I trying to say?”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Dance

“Communism is evil. Its driving forces are the deadly sins of envy and hatred.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 249

Communication, Evil, Envy

“Pastors are sent to utter the deep things of God for the conviction of sin, and for edification and comfort.”

T. B. Joshua (1963) Nigerian Christian leader

Explaining the function of a Pastor - "Prophetic Birth - A Wednesday Wonder" https://archive.is/20120729114538/www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/3456647-prophetic-birth-a-wednesday-wonder All Voices (June 15, 2009)

God

“The greatest sin, after the initial sin, is its publication.”

Machado de Assis book Quincas Borba

O maior pecado, depois do pecado, é a publicação do pecado.
Quincas Borba (1891) ch. 32; Clotilde Wilson (trans.) Philosopher or Dog? (New York: Noonday Press, 1954) p. 41.