sin Quotes

“I knowed very well why [the words] wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all.”

“Yes, we are overcharged for everything nowadays. I should fancy that the real tragedy of the poor is that they can afford nothing but self-denial. Beautiful sins, like beautiful things, are the privilege of the rich.”

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.”

“If I am the chief of sinners, I am the chief of sufferers also.”

“Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”

The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment-- as well as prison.

“Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast,—at her, the child of honorable parents,—at her, the mother of a babe, that would hereafter be a woman, —at her, who had once been innocent, —as the figure, the body, the reality of sin”

I am a man More sinned against than sinning

“God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

“When we merely say that we are bad, the “wrath” of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness.”

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”

“I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact”

“All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.”

But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.

″‘Art thou, too, of the other fools? Here pity lives when it is wholly dead; Who is a greater reprobate than he Who feels compassion at the doom divine?‘”

“Have you forgotten, then, the words with which your Ethics treats of those three dispositions that strike at Heaven’s will: incontinence and malice and mad bestiality?”

“Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? If so, you must not be surprised that you have not received the Holy Spirit, that prayer is difficult, or that your request for faith remains unanswered.”

“Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every sin is a variation of theft.”

“When a man gets angry with his brother and swears at him, when he publicly insults or slanders him, he is guilty of murder and forfeits his relation to God. He erects a barrier not only between himself and his brother, but also between himself and God.”

“This miry slough is a place that can’t be repaired. It is a low-lying place where the scum and filth that come with the conviction of sin drain and collect as the traveling sinner becomes aware of his lost condition. It is the fears, doubts, and discouraging apprehensions about oneself that arise in his soul.”

“Every human being, after all, is possessed with the undeniable urge to confess his sins. Religions were built on such things. And kingdoms were conquered with the promise that all sins would be forgiven afterward.”

“A serious-looking man named Goodwill came to the gate. ‘Who is there?’ he asked. ‘And what do you want?’ Christian hung his head. ‘It is me – a poor burdened sinner. I come from the City of Destruction but am going to Mount Zion so I may be delivered from the wrath to come. I have been told, sir, that this gate leads to my destination. Are you willing to let me enter?’ ‘I am willing with all my heart,’ said he. With that he opened the gate.”

“For fear—that is man’s original and fundamental feeling; through fear everything is explained, original sin and original virtue.”

“I know my own sin. I know that I deserve my punishment. I do not begrudge it.”

“To be smart is not a sin. But to be smart and not use it, that, Peekay, is a sin.”

“When we are staggered by the chilly winds of adversity and battered by the raging storms of disappointment and when through our folly and sin we stray into some destructive far country and are frustrated because of the strange feeling of homesickness, we need to know that there is Someone who loves us, cares for us, understands us, and will give us another chance.”

“I don’t need to punish people for sin. Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. It’s not my purpose to punish it; it’s my joy to cure it.”

“Lukewarm people don’t really want to be saved from their sin; they want only to be saved from the penalty of their sin.”

“Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.”

“God is the only being who is good, and the standards are set by Him. Because God hates sin, He has to punish those guilty of sin. Maybe that’s not an appealing standard. But to put it bluntly, when you get your own universe, you can make your own standards.”

“Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin, as self-neglecting.”

“I remember a text that hung in my nursery as a child. ‘Be sure thy sin will find thee out.’ It’s very true, that.”

“A Christian with a good memory avoids repeating old sins, knows the easiest way through complex situations, and instead of starting over each day continues what was begun in Adam.”

“It is difficult to recognize pride as a sin when it is held up on every side as a virtue, urged as profitable, and rewarded as an achievement.”

“Sometimes the man who looks happiest in town, with the biggest smile, is the one carrying the biggest load of sin. There are smiles and smiles; learn to tell the dark variety from the light.”

“There is laid in the very nature of carnal men a foundation for the torments of hell. ”

“It is difficult to recognize pride as a sin when it is held up on every side as a virtue, urged as profitable, and rewarded as an achievement.”

“As he that walks in slippery places is ... liable to fall, he can’t foresee one moment whether he shall stand or fall the next; and when he does fall, he falls at once, without warning.”

“The corruption of the heart of man is ... immoderate and boundless in its fury ... it is like fire pent up by God’s restraints, when as if it were let loose, it would set on fire the course of nature; and as the heart is now a sink of sin, so, if sin was not restrained, it would immediately turn the soul into a fiery oven, or a furnace of fire and brimstone.”

“Some make gods of their pleasures; some choose Mammon for their god; some make gods of their own supposed excellencies, or the outward advantages they have above their neighbors: some choose one thing for their god, and others another. But men can be happy in no other God but the God of Israel: he is the only fountain of happiness.”

“The wrath of God is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and rise higher and higher, till an outlet is given; and the longer the stream is stopped, the more rapid and mighty is its course, when once it is let loose.”

“The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.”

“‘Well, you’re horse thieves, and that’s a sin in my book,’ Call said. ‘Where do you people come from?‘”

“The truth, of course, was that it was all my own self, and my own impiety had divided me against myself. My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.”

“Who can recall to me the sins I committed as a baby? For in your sight no man is free from sin, not even a child who has lived only one day on earth.”

“Let the strong and mighty laugh at men like me: let us, the weak and the poor, confess our sins to you.”

“All these things, and their like can be occasions of sin because, good though they are, they are of the lowest order of good, and if we are too much tempted by them we abandon those higher and better things, your truth, your law, and you yourself, O Lord our God.”

“And now, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God by condemning me, who am his gift to you.”

“You can’t visit the sins of the father upon the child.”

“When life reaches out with a moment like this, it’s a sin if you don’t reach back.”

“The greatest sin a person can do to another is to take away that life. Next to that, all the rule and religions in the world are secondary; mere words and beliefs that people choose to believe and kill and hate by. My life won’t be lived that way, and neither, I hope, will my children’s. I left for New York happy in the knowledge that my grandmother had not suffered and died for nothing.”

“Human beings can’t see anything without wanting to destroy it, Lyra. That’s original sin.”

“Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.”

“Occasions and opportunities for temptation are innumerable. No wonder I do not know how deeply involved I have been with sin.”

″‘Tis set down so in heaven, but not in Earth.”

“Be killing sin or it will be killing you.”

“I do not understand how a man can be a true believer, in whom sin is not the greatest burden, sorrow and trouble.”

“I listened to their stories and found so many areas where we overlapped – not all the deeds, but the feelings of remorse and hopelessness. I learned that alcoholism isn’t a sin, it’s a disease.”

“So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs.”

“He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once.”

“By the sympathy of your human hearts for sin ye shall scent out all the places—whether in church, bedchamber, street, field, or forest—where crime has been committed, and shall exult to behold the whole earth one stain of guilt, one mighty blood spot.”

″‘My Faith is gone!’ cried he, after one stupefied moment. ‘There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! for to thee is this world given.‘”

“Wherever and whenever Jesus Christ is proclaimed as our sacrifice for sin and sickness, physical healing as well as spiritual salvation will result.”

“As soon as sin was their choice, the cover of darkness was their preference.”

“Corrie ten Boom once said that if the devil can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy.”

“If we—all of us—accept the grace of Jesus Christ, he changes our heart and from sinners makes us saints. To become holy we do not need to turn our eyes away and look somewhere else, or have as it were the face on a holy card! No, no, that is not necessary. To become saints only one thing is necessary: to accept the grace that the Father gives us in Jesus Christ. There, this grace changes our heart. We continue to be sinners for we are weak, but with this grace which makes us feel that the Lord is good, that the Lord is merciful, that the Lord waits for us, that the Lord pardons us—this immense grace that changes our heart.”

“The darkness of his sin was in the hardheartedness with which he resisted God’s power.”

“When a golden girl can win Prayer from out the lips of sin, When the barren almond bears, And a little child gives away its tears, Then shall all the house be still And peace comes to Canterville.”

“It was such happiness to her all the hot, long days that followed; to a girl just entering life there can be no purer, deeper feeling of pleasure than that brought by the knowledge that she is influencing for good some man or woman older than herself, more sin-worn and earth-wearied.”

“The wages of sin are the hardest debts on earth to pay, and they are always collected at inconvenient times and unexpected places.”

But then I remembered that it had died of paralysis and I felt that I too was smiling feebly as if to absolve the simoniac of his sin.

The instinct of the celibate warned him to hold back. But the sin was there; even his sense of honour told him that reparation must be made for such a sin.

“Thus she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone.”

—“I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin.

“He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost; but I shall read it on his heart.”

They averred, that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight, whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time.

“Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest an unspoken crime?”

And ever, after such an outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after long stifling with his own polluted breath.

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth.

And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood.

“That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin.”

“I am powerless to go! Wretched and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me.

Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been,—wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped to find repose,—it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!”

“What did he know about sin and suffering—”

Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face.

Don’t let us talk about it any more, and don’t try to persuade me that the first good action I have done for years, the first little bit of self-sacrifice I have ever known, is really a sort of sin.

“If a man gives way to his temper, and speaks evil of his neighbor, and does not pay his debts, he is not religious, I don’t care how much he goes to church.”