Quotes About Sin

Conscience is always enlightened when sin is seen as hurting someone we love. No sin can touch one of God's stars or silence one of His words, but it can cruelly wound His heart. Once the Penitent understands this truth, he can see why he has such emptiness and desolation and his soul: he hurt the one he loves.

God prefers a loving sinner to a loveless "saint." Love can be trained; pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.

God can do something with those who see what they really are and who know their need of cleansing but can do nothing with the man who feels himself worthy.

Pain is sacrifice without love. Sacrifice is pain with love. When we understand this, then we shall have an answer for those who feel that God should have let us sin without pain:

One cannot tell when grace is coming or how it will work on the soul; whether it will come as a result of a disgust with sin

It is not wisdom that saves; it is ignorance! There is no redemption for the fallen

Why repentance? Because it is the first act of a soul which turns back to God, the first stroke that severs sin from the heart.

The world is full of poetry; it is sin which turns it into prose.

It was only after Adam and Eve had by sin lost the inner effulgence of grace that they became conscious of the fact that they were naked. They felt the need for clothes to cover their newfound shame; previously their bodies had Glowed with a man mantle of charity woven by the fingers of God. It is almost universally true that excessive external display betrays an inner poverty and nakedness of the soul

The fall of the priest is completed by these steps: neglect of prayer, withdrawal to a distance from the Eucharistic Lord, dedication to a comfortable existence, negligence concerning occasions of sin and, finally, the substitution of a creature for Christ.

The son of God chose Peter, who knew sin, rather than the beloved John, as the rock upon which to build His Church, that sinners and the weak might never have excuse to despair.

We give up our time, and get His eternity; we give up our sin, and receive His grace; we give up petty loves, and receive the Flame of Love.

Sin is self-mutilation, the destruction of personality — when it takes the form of pride, it crowns Goodness with thorns; when it takes the form of dishonesty, it nails hands to a Cross; when it takes the form of hate, it blasphemes the dying; when it takes the form of lust, it crucifies.

The obscurity of the external world is a function of my own obscurity to myself; the world has no intrinsic obscurity. Should we say that it comes to the same thing in the end? We must ask up to what point this interior opacity is a result; is it not very largely the consequence of an act? and is not this act simply sin?

Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.

All of my pleasures are guilty, but that's just the way I'm wired.

I pray as follows: May justice reign, may the laws not be broken, may the wise men be poor, and the poor men rich, without sin.

Priests, she insisted, could not sin. It was a thing impossible. Everything that they did, and wished, was of course right. She hoped I would see the reasonableness and duty of the oaths I was to take, and be faithful to them.

Regret is not a proactive feeling. It is situated in disappointment, sorrow, even remorse. It merely wishes things were different without an act to cause a difference. However, repentance is different. Repentance is an admission of, hatred of, and turning away from sin before God.

An animal takes freely anything that it wishes: it commits no sin and is not held responsible for its action because it knows no better. But as soon as the idea of 'mine' and 'thine' has been imprinted upon our consciousness, then also the responsibility comes.

A dimple on the chin, the devil within.

Oh, hour of forgiven sin, moment of perfect pardon, our soul shall never forget you while, within you, life and being find immortality!

We must become a people who are in submission, that is, submitted completely to the mission of the Church, 'in statu missionis.' Thus, living fully within the mainstream of grace, under the mantle of God's divine authority, and by uniting ourselves to the obedience of Christ on the cross, we participate in the reversal of Adam's sin.

We may not all break the Ten Commandments, but we are certainly all capable of it. Within us lurks the breaker of all laws, ready to spring out at the first real opportunity.