Quotes about sin

73 quotes · 50 authors

Quotes

  1. I cannot skill of these thy ways.

    Lord, thou didst make me, yet thou woundest me;

    Lord, thou dost wound me, yet thou dost relieve me:

    Lord, thou relievest, yet I die by thee:

    Lord, thou dost kill me, yet thou dost reprieve me.But when I mark my life and praise,

    Thy justice me most fitly praise:

    For, I do praise thee, yet I praise thee not:

    My prayers mean thee, yet my prayers stray:

    I would do well, yet sin the hand hath got:

    My soul doth love thee, yet it loves delay.

    I cannot skill of these my ways.

  2. 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.

  3. Sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.

  4. People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.

  5. Let us lay it down as an incontrovertible rule that the first impulses of nature are always right; there is no original sin in the human heart, the how and why of the entrance of every vice can be traced. The only natural passion is self-love or selfishness taken in a wider sense. This selfishness is good in itself and in relation to ourselves; and as the child has no necessary relations to other people he is naturally indifferent to them; his self-love only becomes good or bad by the use made of it and the relations established by its means.

  6. The real sin — perhaps it is a sin against the Holy Ghost for which there is no remission — is the sin of heresy, the sin of thinking for oneself. The saying has been heard before now, here in Spain, that to be a liberal — that is, a heretic — is worse than being an assassin, a thief, or an adulterer. The gravest sin is not to obey the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason.

  7. In adultery, there is usually tenderness and self-sacrifice; in murder, courage; in profanation and blasphemy, a certain satanic splendour. Judas elected those offences unvisited by any virtues: abuse of confidence and informing.

  8. What one man does is something done, in some measure, by all men. For that reason a disobedience committed in a garden contaminates the human race; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew suffices to save it.

  9. This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.

  10. The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

  11. Her rash hand in evil hour

    Forth reaching to the fruit, she plucked, she eat:

    Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,

    Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe

    That all was lost.

  12. Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit

    Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste

    Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

    With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

    Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,