quotations about sin
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
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
In the lower degree of sin, God is neglected; in the higher degree of sin, God is affronted.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
If it were possible to have a life absolutely free from every feeling of sin, what a terrifying vacuum it would be!
CESARE PAVESE
This Business of Living
The wages of sin are unreported.
ANONYMOUS
Wickedness comes to its height by degrees. He that dares say of a less sin, Is it not a little one? will ere long say of a greater, Tush, God regards it not!
ANNE BRADSTREET
Meditations Divine and Moral
I don't really care whether people think I've succumbed to a life of sin, I know myself and my life, and I know that I'm healthier than I ever was when I was a "good" Christian.
DANIELLE HILBORN
"Hate the sinner", Daily Californian, September 1, 2017
Remorse withers the succulent fruits of sin.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
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"
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
GEORGE ELIOT
Daniel Deronda
Christians get very angry toward other Christians who sin differently than they do.
PHILIP YANCEY
attributed, Jesus Now: Unveiling the Present-Day Ministry of Christ
The man who does ill, ill must suffer too.
AESCHYLUS
fragment
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
Sin is a terrible reality -- and one reason it's so terrible is because it separates us from God. But sin is also terrible because it affects every one of us, no matter how good or bad we are. In other words, we are all guilty before God, and none of us deserves His forgiveness or salvation.... But does this mean our situation is hopeless? Does this mean God will never forgive us, and Heaven's door is forever closed to us? No, it doesn't -- and the reason is because God has done for us what we could never do for ourselves. We can never cleanse ourselves of our sins, no matter how hard we try -- but God has provided the way for us to be forgiven and cleansed!
BILLY GRAHAM
"Jesus is all the necessary proof that God will forgive you", Marietta Daily Journal, August 12, 2017
To make it evident that Sin is a great evil, we need but reflect a little on the nature and effects of it. If we inquire into the nature of Sin, we shall find that it is founded in the subversion of the dignity, and defacing the beauty of human nature: And that it consists in the darkness of our understanding, the depravity of our affections, and the feebleness and impotence of the will.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Many refuse to let Christ in when he knocks at the door of their hearts for the express purpose of paying their debt of sin. These people are like the poor tenant woman of whom we once read. She could not pay her rent and her landlord was about to put her out of his house. Her pastor heard of her distress and hastened with the money to pay her rent for her. She heard the knock at the door, but supposing it was her hard-hearted landlord, she hid and refused to open the door.
NICIAS BALLARD COOKSEY
Helps to Happiness
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
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
Be killing sin or it will be killing you.
JOHN OWEN
The Mortification of Sin
If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.
HYMAN G. RICKOVER
The New York Times, November 3, 1986