Quotes About Sin

Adam thus bequeathed us his death, not his sin … We do not inherit the sins of our fathers, even though we may be made to endure their punishment. Guilt cannot be transmitted. We are linked to Adam only by his memory, which becomes our own, and by his death, which foreshadows our own. Not by his sin.

But all the wickedness in the world which man may do or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal dropped in the sea.

For the opposite of sin is faith and never virtue, and we live in a world which believes that self-control can make us virtuous. But that's not how it works. How many men and women we have encountered, of great personal virtue and moral rectitude, convinced of their own righteousness, who have also been totally insensitive to the needs of others and sometimes downright cruel!

But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.

If I have sinned so much, if I have been since then so solitary, if my soul has taken such a swirling and solitary movement, if I have doubted everyting, if I have been fatalist and have been a pessimistic child who awaits death every day and who almost seeks it out, if I have opened myself slowly and late to happiness, and if I am still a somber man incapable of laughing wholeheartedly it is because you left me . . .

The idea that sins can be forgiven is at the root of mankind's problems. Everyone pays...sooner or later.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.

The sins of teachers are the teachers of sin.

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

But there's also an upside-down sort of happiness, a black happiness, that comes from doing evil to others.

Papa used to say that wealth is a sin and poverty is a punishment but that God apparently wants there to be no connection between the sin and the punishment. One man sins and another is punished. That's how the world is made.

That's how God created us: wealth is a crime and poverty is a punishment, though the punishment is not given to the one who sinned, but to the one who hasn't got the money to escape the punishment. The woman, naturally, cannot deny that she is pregnant. The man denies it as much as he likes, and what can you do? God gave men the pleasure and us the punishment.

Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin," she reflected. "Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.

Sin is whatever obscures the soul.

I think God is really a ruthless artist and earth is an early draft. This draft was bad, overloaded with gratuitous cruelty. Love doesn't work. Pride is a sin. Nothing we do is right.

Virtue, whatever else it means, at least means being more human; it would not be virtuous if it did not. Sin, whatever else it means, means being less human, more still, cold, proud, selfish, mean, cruel, and all the rest of it.

If it is God who has been withholding His presence, exposing the sin, calling for its destruction and a return to obedience, surely we can count upon His grace to strengthen us for the life He asks of us. It is not a question of what you can do. It is a question of whether you will with your whole heart give God what is due Him and allow His will to be done in your life.

It is necessary to understand that it is not sin that humbles most, but grace.

when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.

Notice how Christ uses that word deny twice. He said to Peter the first time, "Deny himself" (Matthew 16:24); He said to Peter the second time, "Thou shalt deny me" (Matthew 26:34). It is either of the two. There is no other choice for us; we must either deny self or deny Christ. There are two great powers fighting each other the self-nature in the power of sin, and Christ in the power of God. Either of these must rule within us.

waiting on God] is not only rendered necessary by our sin and helplessness. It is simply and ruly our restoration to our original destiny and our highhest nobility, to our true place and glory as creatures blessedly dependent on the All-Glorious God.

Humility, the place of entire dependence upon God, is from the very nature of things the first duty and the highest virtue of His creatures. And so pride—the loss of humility—is the root of every sin and evil.

Not to be occupied with thy sin, but to be occupied with God, brings deliverance from self. IX. Humility