quotations about sin
Men are willing to admit that they are sinners, but not that they are sinning.
IVAN PANIN
Thoughts
Black sin is oft white truth, that missed its way.
ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
"Twin-Born"
Sometimes one sin can make a character. Many women, by sinning, have realized the meaning of goodness and dedicated themselves to goodness for the rest of their lives. By losing virtue they have found virtue. Sometimes they are women condemned by the world. Thereafter they go through life like wonderful presences, shedding about them sympathy and peace. In Hester Prynne, Hawthorne has given a supreme example of a woman of this kind. For when a good woman, one set apart from evil by the conditions of her life and by her nature, suddenly finds herself associated with evil, she becomes allied with all the sins of the world. These forces may either destroy her or make her over again into a creature fine, noble, through the fires of shame and pity. There are men, too, who never learn the meaning of life till they have suffered through sin. Sometimes revelation comes through one sin, sometimes through a long career of sinning. "Most sins," says a wise philanthropist who has associated with great sinners, "are only perverted virtues." Perhaps, after all, the lessons of sin are really the lessons of virtue.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Perquisites of Sin", Intimations
I'm living in sin
(At the Holiday Inn)
At the Holiday Inn, yeah
(Living in sin)
KISS
"Living in Sin"
Like ashes, grey and tarnished,
My sins are sifting down:
I'll have a heart fire-burnished
To carry back to town!
KARLE WILSON BAKER
"Maples in the Fall", Burning Bush
It is certain, sin hath no real pleasures to bestow; they are all embittered, either by adverse strokes of providence from without, or painful and dreadful gripes and stings of conscience within.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other "sins" are invented nonsense. (Hurting yourself is not sinful--just stupid.)
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN
The Notebooks of Lazarus Long
It is a great deal easier to commit a second sin, than it was to commit the first; and a great deal harder to repent of a second, than it was to repent of the first.
BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE
Moral and Religious Aphorisms
So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by conscience; and that sentinel, once dozed, sleeps fast, not to be awakened while the tide of pleasure continues to flow or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again.
DANIEL DEFOE
Roxana
Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside.
WM. PAUL YOUNG
The Shack
If I could just hide
The sinner inside
And keep him denied
How sweet life would be
If I could be free
From the sinner in me
DEPECHE MODE
"The Sinner in Me"
Sin is a deceiver and a destroyer, and God hates it for that reason. Just as you hate it when your child gets hurt, so in a far greater way God hates it when we hurt ourselves by our sin.
BILLY GRAHAM
"God hates sin, but He doesn't hate us because we sin", Brunswick News, August 18, 2017
We should have been strangers to the miseries of life, and to the dreary mansions of the grave. But sin, that cursed monster, sin hath quenched our intellectual light; hath inthralled the will to vile unruly passions; hath vitiated the memory, tenacious now of evil; hath banished true peace from the conscience. Some are harassed with direful apprehensions, and consumed away with fearful terrors. What multitudes are stretched on the bed of pain! It was sin which bade the head ache, fevers to revel through our veins, convulsions shake the human frames, and agues agitate our bodies.
WILLIAM MCEWEN
"On the Great Evil of Sin", Select Essays, Doctrinal & Practical on a Variety of the Most Important and Interesting Subjects in Divinity
Sin always wounds the sinner.
CARYLL HOUSELANDER
The Reed of God
That purple-lined palace of sweet sin.
JOHN KEATS
"Lamia"
There is a great difference among people in the capacity to feel the effects of sin. Where one may quickly recover and become apparently sound again, another, after committing perhaps the same sin, will be corrupted or made morbid for the rest of his life. The best we can acquire from sinning is the power to understand the meaning of the moral law and the importance of living in harmony with its working. From remorse there may be little or no gain. The healthy consciousness quickly reacts. For this reason we ought to be slow to condemn those who go on sinning lightly and inconsequently. Theirs may be only superficial blundering. On the other hand, of course, their indifference may be the result of hardness. Even here they deserve sympathy. Through repeated sinning they may have lost the meaning of life.
JOHN DANIEL BARRY
"Perquisites of Sin", Intimations
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
A sin takes on new and real terrors when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.
MARK TWAIN
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
The man who sins and then repents deserves a well-twisted rope at the gallows.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
Like hairs on the head, mortal man is joined to Jesus Christ, the head of all, but they are full of transgressions and sins because of man's delight in the flesh. But the Church regenerates and purifies these from the unclean stench and filth of sin by penitence and confession, just as hair is cleansed from dew and drops, and as dust is shaken out and cleansed from wool.
HILDEGARD OF BINDEN
letter to the Abbot, c. 1166