quotations about sin
God laid no foundation of wickedness in the principles of His creation; it is an unnatural super-structure of our own, without a foundation.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
All the sinners, all who are
in torment are my brothers and sisters.
Who is there in this world of
sin, male or female, who has not committed sin?
Let alone us: Those who are
said to be the saviours of
sinners are themselves sullied of sin.
KAZI NAZRUL ISLAM
"Sin", Rebel and Other Poems
Past sins, if you repent of them, whiten you. They made a great psalmist out of David, a faithful believer out of the prostitute Rahab, a zealous apostle out of the persecutor Saul. I have been a loved preacher and writer with a particular vocation. My sermons and books would not have had the same quality without my past of anarchy, vice, and violent atheism.
RICHARD WURMBRAND
If Prison Walls Could Speak
Sometimes we keep the sin in our lives well protected, guarded, covered over with lies. Sometimes we are not free enough to own our sin, so we cannot be healed of it. An unacknowledged wound cannot be healed.
MACRINA WIEDERKEHR
Seasons of Your Heart
That is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not present.
ANNIE BESANT
The Immediate Future: Lectures Delivered in Queen's Hall
The man who finds that in the course of his life he has done a lot of wrong often wakes up at night in terror, like a child with a nightmare, and his life is full of foreboding: but the man who is conscious of no wrongdoing is filled with cheerfulness and hope.
PLATO
The Republic
Too often, we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated. We are simply disobedient. It might be good if we stop using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather, we should use the terms obedience and disobedience. When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may in fact be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey.
JERRY BRIDGES
The Pursuit of Holiness
For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
In the lower degree of sin, God is neglected; in the higher degree of sin, God is affronted.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
A sin is wrong not because it makes you feel bad--though it should--but because it is wrong.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
Adam was but human--this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
MARK TWAIN
Pudd'nhead Wilson
Be killing sin or it will be killing you.
JOHN OWEN
The Mortification of Sin
If our goal is to be close to God, to have a relationship with God, sin is the stuff that knocks us off course or sends us in another direction.
JEFFREY HEYDEN-KAYE
"Let's talk about sin, shall we?", Bashaw Star, August 10, 2017
Sin is the great element of hell, and where it exists heaven cannot be. Its triumphs are deeper than those of time, and more terrible than death. It has swept over the moral world, more glorious than the physical, and blighted by the beautiful and desecrated the holy. It has scattered abroad and afar the seeds of envy, war, lust, intemperance, murder, and all abomination and iniquity. It has drawn man aside from innocence and rectitude, and he has gone forth from the joy of Eden with a bowed head and a burning heart; and, worse than all, it has spread a veil athwart his moral vision, and alienated him from his Maker.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Some tourists think Amsterdam is a city of sin, but in truth it is a city of freedom. And in freedom, most people find sin.
JOHN GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars
It's beginning to start...
When you're lying like a tart
Oh sin in my heart
When you grovel at my feet
Oh sin in my heart
It's short and sweet
SIOUXSIE AND THE BANSHEES
"Sin in My Heart"
The man who does ill, ill must suffer too.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.
JAMES JOYCE
Ulysses
If God had pardoned Sin without any amends, God would have been thought to countenance Sin: and Man would have thought Sin no great matter.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks;
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
King Lear