Great Throughts Treasury

"All sin is a form of lying...Total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"To abstain from sin when a man cannot sin is to be forsaken by sin, not to forsake it." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"The first and worst of all frauds is the cheat one's self. All sin is easy after that." - Kenneth Eldon Bailey

"Idleness is a constant sin, and labor is a duty. Idleness is the devil's home for temptation and for unprofitable, distracting musings; while labor profiteth others and ourselves." - Anne Baxter

"As thou desirest the love of God and man, beware of pride. It is a tumor in the mind, that breaks and ruins all thine actions; a worm in thy treasury, that eats and ruins thine estate. It loves no man, and is beloved of none; it disparages another's virtues by detraction, and thine own vainglory. It is the friend of the flatterer, the mother of envy, the nurse of fury, the sin of devils, and devil of mankind. It hates superiors, scorns inferiors, and owns no equal. In short, till thou hate it, God hate thee." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England

"Every other sin hath some pleasures annexed to it, or will admit of some excuse, but envy wants both. We should strive against it, for if indulged in it will be to us as a foretaste of hell upon earth." - Richard Francis Burton, fully Sir Richard Francis Burton

"God made sin possible just as he made all lying wonders possible, but he never made it a fact, never set anything in his plan to harmonize with it. Therefore it enters the world as a forbidden fact against everything that God has ordained." - Horace Bushnell

"As the bosom of earth blooms again and again, having buried out of sight the dead leaves of autumn, and loosed the frosty bands of winter; so does the heart, in spite of all that melancholy poets write, feel many renewed springs and summers. It is a beautiful and a blessed world we live in, and whilst that life lasts, to lose the enjoyment of it is a sin." - Talbot Wilson Chambers

"Know what your sin is and confess it; but do not imagine that you have approved yourself a penitent by confessing sin in the abstract." - Theodore Cuyler, fully Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

"It is not true that there are no enjoyments in the ways of sin; there are, many and various. But the great and radical defect of them all is, that they are transitory and insubstantial, at war with reason and conscience, and always leave a sting behind... They may and often do satisfy us for a moment; but it is death in the end. It is the bread of heaven and the water of life that can so satisfy that we shall hunger no more and thirst no more forever." - Tyron Edwards

"Sin with the multitude, and your responsibility and guilt are as great and as truly personal, as if you alone had done the wrong." - Tyron Edwards

"I could not live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God." - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"A man is always capable of a sin which he thinks another is capable of, or which he himself is capable of imputing to another." -

"The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thought and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve the people? Give them, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats." -

"There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer, no disease that enough love will not heal, no door that enough love will not open; no gulf that enough love will not bridge; no wall that enough love will not throw down; no sin that enough love will not redeem. It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble, how hopeless the outlook, how muddled the tangle, how great the mistake. A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all. If only you could love enough you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world." -

"Christianity, by making love a sin, did Love a great service." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but because it is hurtful." - Benjamin Franklin

"Life and death are but phases of the same thing, the reverse and obverse of the same coin... I want you all to treasure death and suffering more than life and to appreciate their cleansing and purifying character. Death which is an Eternal verity is revolution, as birth and after is slow and steady evolution. Death is as necessary for man's growth as life itself... All fear is a sign of want of faith... Hate the sin and love the sinner." -

"A minister, without boldness, is like a smooth file, a knife without an edge, a sentinel that is afraid to let off his gun. If men will be bold in sin, ministers must be bold to reprove." - William Gurnall

"Whether a prophet is true or false does not depend upon the correctness of his predictions. It depends upon the purity and sincerity of his concern for the things threatened by human sin and divine anger. Indeed his predictions are the more likely to be correct, the less he is a true prophet and the more affinities he has within himself to the destructive tendencies of his age." - Erich Heller

"We often wonder that certain men and women are left by God to the commission of sins that shock us. We wonder how, under the temptation of a single hour, they fall from the very heights of virtue and of honor into sin and shame. The fact is that there are no such falls as these, or there are next to none. These men and women are those who have dallied with temptation - have exposed themselves to the influence of it, and have been weakened and corrupted by it." -

"The good hate sin because they love virtue." - Horace, full name Quintus Horatius Flaccus NULL

"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." - Charles Kingsley

"So near are the boundaries of panegyric and invective, that a worn-out sinner is sometimes found to make the best declaimer against sin. The same high-seasoned descriptions which in his unregenerate state served to inflame his appetites, in his new province of a moralist will serve him (a little turned) to expose the enormity of those appetites in other men." - Charles Lamb

"There is no greater curse than the lack of contentment. No greater sin than the desire for possession. Therefore, he who is contented with contentment shall always be content." -

"Many afflictions will not cloud and obstruct peace of mind so much as one sin: therefore, if you would walk cheerfully, be most careful to walk holily. All the winds about the earth make not an earthquake, but only that within." - Robert Leighton

"Sin first is pleasing, then it grows easy, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual, then confirmed; then the man is impenitent, then he is obstinate, then he is resolved never to repent, and then he is ruined." - Robert Leighton

"Remorse is the pain of sin." - Joseph Parker

"If thou wouldst conquer thy weakness, thou must never gratify it. No man is compelled to evil; his consent only makes it his. It is no sin to be tempted, but to be overcome." - William Penn

"True silence is the rest of the mind, and is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. It is a great virtue: it covers folly, keeps secrets, avoids disputes, and prevents sin." - William Penn

"Our outward act is promoted from within, and from the sinner's mind proceeds the sin." - Matthew Prior

"Earth has not a spectacle more glorious or more fair to show than this - love tolerating intolerance; charity covering, as with a avail, even the sin of the lack of charity." -

"The needy stain the garment of chastity with sin, as those who are hungry steal bread." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"It is no certain evidence, that because the conscience feels the weight of sin, the heart is humbled on account of it; that because the conscience approves of the rectitude of the Divine justice, the heart bows to the Divine sovereignty." - Gardiner Spring

"The costliest thing on earth is the drunkard’s song. It costs ruin of body. It costs ruin of mind...The costliest thing on earth is sin. The most expensive of all music is the Song of the Drunkards. It is the highest tariff of nations - not a protective tariff, but a tariff of doom, a tariff of woe, an tariff of death." - Thomas De Witt Talmage

"Why blame the world? The world is free of sin; the blame is yours and mine." - Abul ʿAla Al-Maʿarri NULL

"Question: What is the most harmful sin? Answer: The sin thou dost not know to be a sin." - Al-Anṭākī , full name Yaḥya ibn Saʿīd al-Anṭākī NULL

"A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission." -

"The continuous and widespread fragmentation of the church has been the scandal of the ages. It has been Satan’s master strategy. The sin of disunity probably has caused more souls to be lost than all other sins combined." - Paul Billheimer

"Inaction in a deed of mercy becomes an action in a deadly sin." - Book of Golden Precepts, aka The Book of Golden Precepts NULL

"Most newspaper headlines are more effective examples of man’s sin writ large than any book on theology can ever hope to be." - Robert McAfee Brown

"He who has tasted the sweetness of solitude and tranquility, is free from fear and sin, while he drinks in the nectar of the Law." -

"In the kind of world that I see in history there is one sin that locks people up in all their other sins… the sin of self-righteousness." - Herbert Butterfield, fully Sir Herbert Butterfield

"Sin is an affair of the will. It is not “a vestige of our animal inheritance.” That trivial notion comes from an unexamined, too-quickly swallowed doctrine of evolution. Why blame the brute creation? No self-respecting wolf would be guilty of our modern wars." - George Arthur Buttrick

"Blind obedience is itself an abuse of human morality. It is a misuse of the human soul in the name of religious commitment. It is a sin against individual conscience. It makes moral children of the adults from whom moral agency is required. It makes a vow, which is meant to require religious figures to listen always to the law of God, beholden first to the laws of very human organizations in the person of very human authorities. It is a law that isn't even working in the military and can never substitute for personal morality." - Joan Chittister, fully Sister Joan D. Chittister

"Sin is a suppurating wound; punishment is the surgeon’s knife." -

"Laughter does not seem to be a sin, but it leads to sin." -

"An inferiority complex is a disbelief in your own self, your own powers of mind. This to me is a sin, for every human being has been made in the image of God and is perfect, whole, and complete." - Albert E Cliffe

"Until a man realizes sin as the death of his own higher self and as a rebellion against the law of his true happiness, there is no true conversion of heart towards the higher life." - Father Cuthbert

"Compassion is the root of religion; pride the root of sin." - Tulsidas NULL