Great Throughts Treasury

"Every sin provides its punishment." - Amos Bronson Alcott

"Sin is whatever obscures the soul." - André Gide, fully André Paul Guillaume Gide

"There is no sin punished more implacably by nature than the sin of resistance to change." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh, born Anne Spencer Morrow

"I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”" - Annie Dillard

"I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"The sin of racial pride still represents the most basic challenge to the American conscience. We cannot dodge this challenge without renouncing our highest moral pretentions." - Arthur Meier Schlesinger, Jr., born Arthur Bancroft Schlesinger

"No consenting soul can be made to sin, and so sin is inexcusable." - Author Unknown NULL

"The more doctors, the more disease; the more lawyers, the more crime; the more philosophers, the more folly; the more priests, the more sin." - Author Unknown NULL

"No sin is too big for God to pardon, and none is too small for habit to magnify." - Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda NULL

"Sin is a defiance to the authority of God, a contradiction to the law of righteousness, a disturbance to the society of men, and a distraction to the soul of the sinner." - Benjamin Whichcote

"To be an enemy is a sin; to have one is a temptation." - Benjamin Whichcote

"Our nature tempts us perpetually; criminal desire is often excited; but sin is not completed till reason consents." - Blaise Pascal

"True repentance consists in the heart being broken for sin and broken from sin. Some often repent, yet never reform; they resemble a man traveling in a dangerous path, who frequently starts and stops, but never turns back." - Bonnell Thornton

"The slightest sorrow for sin is sufficient if it produce amendment, and the greatest insufficient if it do not." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Sin spoils the spirit’s delicacy, and unwillingness deadens its susceptibility." - Charles Henry Parkhurst

"If you wish to be miserable, think about yourself; about what you want, what you like, what you respect people ought to pay you, what people think of you; and then to you nothing will be pure. You will spoil everything you touch; you will make sin and misery for yourself out of everything God sends you; you will be as wretched as you choose." -

"Nothing the Great Mystery placed in the land of the Indian pleased the white man, and nothing escaped his transforming hand. Wherever forests have not been mowed down, wherever the animal is recessed in their quiet protection, wherever the earth is not bereft of four-footed life - that to him is an “unbroken wilderness.” But, because for the Lakota there was no wilderness, because nature was not dangerous but hospitable, not forbidding but friendly, Lakota philosophy was healthy - free from fear and dogmatism. And here I find the great distinction between the faith of the Indian and the white man. Indian faith sought the harmony of man with his surrounding; the other sought the dominance of surrounding. In sharing, in loving all and everything, one people naturally found a due portion of the thing they sought, while, in fearing, the other found need of conquest. For one man the world was full of beauty; for the other it was a place of sin and ugliness to be endured until he went to another world, there to become a creature of wings, half-man and half-bird. Forever one man directed his Mystery to change the world He had made; forever this man pleaded with Him to chastise the wicked ones; and forever he implored his God to send His light to earth. Small wonder this man could not understand the other. But the old Lakota was wise. He knew that man’s heart, away from nature, become hard; he knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to lack of respect for humans, too. So he kept his children close to nature’s softening influence." -

"Hell is but the collected ruins of the moral world, and sin is the principle that has made them." - Christopher Marlowe

"There is no sin but ignorance." - Christopher Marlowe

"The nature or very essence of phenomena, whether vital or mineral, will always remain unknown... Absolute knowledge could, therefore, leave nothing outside itself; and only on condition of knowing everything could man be granted its attainment. Man behaves as if he were destined to reach this absolute knowledge; and the incessant why which he puts to nature proves it. Indeed, this hope, constantly disappointed, constantly reborn, sustains and always will sustain successive generation sin the passionate search for truth." - Claude Bernard

"I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to “rejoice” as much as by anything else." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family

"God cannot be used as a stop-gap. We must not wait until we are at the end of our tether; he must be found at the center of life; in life, and not only in death; in health and vigor, and not only in suffering; in activity, and not only in sin." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"‘Tis the beginning of hell in this life, and a passion not to be excused. Every other sin hath some pleasure annexed to it, or will admit of an excuse: envy alone wants both." - Edmund Burke

"The only sure-enough sinner is the man who congratulates himself that he is without sin." - Elbert Green Hubbard

"The knowledge of sin is the beginning of salvation." - Epicurus NULL

"Certainly the contemplation of death, as the wages of sin, and passage to another world, is holy and religious; but he fear of it, as a tribute due unto Nature, is weak." - Francis Bacon

"The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent toward them. That is the essence of inhumanity." - George Bernard Shaw

"Fear nothing but sin." - George Herbert

"He who cannot find time to consult his Bible will one day find he has time to be sick; he who has no time to pray must find time to die; he who can find no time to reflect is most likely to find time to sin; he who cannot find time for repentance will find an eternity in which repentance will be of no avail; he who cannot find time to work for others may find an eternity in which to suffer for himself." - Hannah More

"Let us all resolve, first, to attain the grace of silence; second, to deem all fault-finding that does not good a sin, and to resolve, when we are ourselves happy, not to poison the atmosphere for our neighbors by calling upon them to remark every painful and disagreeable feature in their daily life, third, to practice the grace and virtue of praise." - Harriet Beecher Stowe

"Every human being on this earth is born with a tragedy, and it isn't original sin. They are born with the tragedy that they have to grow up . . . a lot of people don't have the courage to do it." - Helen Hayes

"Remorse is impotent; it will sin again. Only repentance is strong; it can end everything." - Henry Miller, aka Henry Valentine Miller

"Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin." - Henry Ward Beecher

"Envy may justly be called “the gall of bitterness and bond of iniquity;” it is the most acid fruit that grows on the stock of sin, an fluid so subtle that nothing but the fire of divine love can purge it from the soul." - Hosea Ballou

"Preserve your conscience always soft and sensitive. If but one sin force its way into that tender part of the soul and dwell thee, the road is paved for a thousand iniquities." - Isaac Watts

"Vice and virtue chiefly imply the relation of our actions to men in this world; sin and holiness rather imply their relation to God and the other world." - Isaac Watts

"There is no sin we can be tempted to commit, but we shall find a greater satisfaction in resisting than in committing." - James Howell

"By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk, but most by lewd and lavish act of sin, let in defilement to the inward parts, the soul grows clotted by contagion, imbodies, and imbrues, till she quite loose the divine property of her first being." - John Milton

"Law can discover sin, but not remove it." - John Milton

"Death form sin now power can separate." - John Milton

"Sin is not in the act, but in the choice." - John Ruskin

"No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or agreement; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin - victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts." - John Ruskin

"No peace was ever won from fate by subterfuge or argument; no peace is ever in store for any of us, but that which we shall win by victory over shame or sin - victory over the sin that oppresses, as well as over that which corrupts." - John Ruskin

"Religion contracts the circle of our pleasures, but leaves it wide enough for her votaries to expatiate sin." - Joseph Addison

"Perfection is not for the pure of soul; there may be virtue in sin." - Kahlil Gibran

"The greatest incitement to sin is the hope of not being punished." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"They do more harm by their evil example than by their actual sin." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction." - Nikos Kazantzakis

"Filial obedience is the first and greatest requisite of a state; by this we become good subjects to our emperors, capable of behaving with just subordination to our superiors, and grateful dependents on heaven; by this we become fonder of marriage, in order to be capable of exacting obedience from other sin our turn; by this we become good magistrates, for early submission is the truest lesson to those who would learn to rule. By this the whole state may be said to resemble one family." - Oliver Goldsmith

"You commit a sin of omission if you do not utilize all the power that is within you. All people have claims on man, and to the person with special talents, this is a very special claim. It is required that a person take part in the actions and clashes of their time than the peril of being judged not to have lived at all." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.