Morality And Sin Quotes & Sayings

One time I told her that she reminded me of that charming tale, the one with the red shoes."
Helen had always hated that story, in which a little girl who had dared to wear red shoes to her confirmation had been doomed to dance in them until she died. "You're referring to the one by Hans Christian Andersen? It's a morality tale about the wages of sin, is it not?"
His smile faded, and his gaze returned to hers, now appraising rather than dismissive. "I confess, I don't recall the moral of the story."
"No doubt it's been a long time since you've read it." Helen made her face into the inscrutable mask that had always annoyed the twins and provoked them to call her a sphinx. "The red shoes become instruments of death, after a girl yields to temptation. — Lisa Kleypas

Christ... did not come on earth to be a conqueror or a philosopher, or a mere teacher of morality. He came to save sinners. He came to do that which man could never do for himself - to do that which money and learning can never obtain - to do that which is essential to man's real happiness. He came to 'take away sin'. — Richard D. Phillips

It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist, he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward forgiveness of sin. I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it ... Among the sayings & discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence: and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being.
[Letter to William Short, 13 April 1820] — Thomas Jefferson

In your personal morality code, make it the most serious kind of sin to tell a lie to yourself. Allow nothing to be as sacred as your own word. Make this one change in your life, and your whole life will change. — Mike Hernacki

I remember, as a boy, hearing a Christian missionary preach to a crowd in India. Among other sweet things he was telling them was that if he gave a blow to their idol with his stick, what could it do? One of his hearers sharply answered, "If I abuse your God, what can He do?" "You would be punished," said the preacher, "when you die." "So my idol will punish you when you die," retorted the Hindu. The tree is known by its fruits. When I have seen amongst them that are called idolaters, men, the like of whom in morality and spirituality and love I have never seen anywhere, I stop and ask myself, "Can sin beget holiness? — Swami Vivekananda

Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from "moral inhibitions." They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the heavens, they would drive his ambassadors from the earth. In a lesser sphere, that is why many men sneer at virtue
because it makes vice uncomfortable. — Fulton J. Sheen

Perhaps great sins start as simple weakness, and the consistent placing of self before others. — Anne Perry

A process of self-deception to satisfy and summarily persuade yourself of righteousness. What one among us has any excuse but self-love? We do not create or confess a morality that is convenient, that lends itself to growth, and remains simple, that allows transgression without excuse or punishment. It would be wise and commonsense to do so, whatever the state of affairs in your mind. Nature eventually denies that which it affirms: Through permanent association with the same moral code we help desire to transgress. Desire of those things denied, the more you restrict the more you sin, but desire equally desires preservation of moral instinct, so desire is its own conflict (and weakly enough). Have no fear, the Bull of earth has long had nothing to do with your unclean conscience, your stagnant ideas of morality. The microbe alone would seem without fear! — Austin Osman Spare

This is biblical ethics. It has little to do with the middle-class ethics of avoiding a few things which are supposed to be wrong and doing a few things which are supposed to be right. Biblical ethics means standing in ultimate decisions for or against God. — Paul Tillich

In the Bible, fate was often presented as the handmaiden of morality: sin was succeeded by misfortune, righteousness by prosperity, with reward and punishment instrumental in persuading man to obey divine commandments. — Israel Shenker

Life is larger than any principle. Morality is an idea, but life is what we live. How can we fit it into this idea without damaging it? More lives have been ruined in attempts to prevent sin than because of sin itself."
"Should we live in sin then?"
"No. But prohibiting it doesn't help at all. It creates hypocrisy and spiritual cripples."
"So what should we do?"
"I don't know. — Mesa Selimovic

The logic is that if you've got excess money and throw it away on booze and cigarettes, then that's your business. But if you're poor, then that's a sin and a shame. Because if you're poor, rich people assume you're on welfare, or you're getting food stamps or some other social services. Once you take a penny from the government, a morality clause goes into effect, where you're never allowed to have anything that you might actually enjoy. It's the hair shirt of welfare. — Linda Tirado

We tend to look at sin according to the world's moral standards. We think that lying is wrong because it betrays trust, that stealing is wrong because it destroys society. Homosexual adoption is said to be wrong by many people because children need a mother and a father. If the "morality" of something is based on what works, then it is fine for spouses to lie to each other as long as they find a way to have a relationship that works. Or stealing is morally okay as long as no one notices that he has been ripped off. Or if children raised by homosexuals are proven to be stable and happy, then the lifestyle of homosexuality becomes acceptable. But this perspective is a mistaken one. Rather, sin is wrong for one reason only: God says it's wrong. — Ray Comfort

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge. — J. Budziszewski

Such grave matters as sin and forgiveness should remain between man and God — Stephen King

A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. — Ayn Rand

Grace abounds in contemporary movies, books, novels, films and music. If God is not in the whirlwind, He may be in a Woody Allen film, or a Bruce Springsteen concert. Most people understand imagery and symbol better than doctrine and dogma. Images touch hearts and awaken imaginations. One theologian suggested that Springsteen's 'Tunnel of Love' album, in which he symbolically sings of sin, death, despair and redemption, is more important for Catholics than the Pope's last visit when he spoke of morality only in doctrinal propositions. — Brennan Manning

The big moment in the medieval myth is the awaking of the heart to compassion, the transformation of passion into compassion.... St. Paul had written, "For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all." You cannot be so disobedient that God's mercy will not be able to follow you, so give him a chance. "Sin bravely," as Luther said, and see how much of God's mercy you can invoke. The great sinner is the great awakener of God to compassion. The idea is an essential one in relation to the paradoxology of morality and the values of life. — Joseph Campbell

What is morality? It is not the following of enjoined rules of conduct. It is not a question of standing above temptations, or of conquering hate, anger, greed, lust and violence.
Questioning your actions before and after creates the moral problem. What is responsible for this situation is the faculty of distinguishing between right and wrong and influencing your actions accordingly.Life is action. Unquestioned action is morality. Questioning your actions is destroying the expression of life. A person who lets life act in its own way without the protective movement of thought has no self to defend. What need will he have to lie or cheat or pretend or to commit any other act which his society considers immoral? — U.G. Krishnamurti

The Christian churches were offered two things: the spirit of Jesus and the idiotic morality of Paul, and they rejected the higher inspiration ... Following Paul, we have turned the goodness of love into a fiend and degraded the crowning impulse of our being into a capital sin. — Frank Harris

They had lived to see their simple patriotism derided, their morality despised, their savings devalued. They caused no trouble. Millions of pounds of public money wasn't regularly siphoned into their neighbourhoods in the hope of bribing, cajoling or coercing them into civic virtue. If they protested that their cities had become alien, their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90 per cent of the children spoke no English, they were lectured about the cardinal sin of racism by those more expensively and comfortably circumstanced. Unprotected by accountants, they were the milch-cows of the rapacious Revenue. No lucrative industry of social concern and psychological analysis had grown up to analyse and condone their inadequacies on the grounds of deprivation or poverty. — P.D. James

Mankind's first sin gave us the ability to know both good and evil. Our subsequent sins make us increasingly unable to tell the difference. — Ron Brackin

What goodness she might hold in her heart had been overshadowed by her actions, again and again, She wasn't a bad person, but she might was well be. — Sonja Yoerg

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 D. Chittister

For the lips of an immoral woman drip honey, and her mouth is smoother than oil; but in the end she is as bitter as wormword, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of hell — Justin Cronin

Physical development was alleged to assist spiritual and intellectual development, while also helping safeguard boys from the 'solitary and sexual sin' of masturbation. — Martin Crotty

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge
he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil
he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor
he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire
he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy
all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is desired to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was
that robot of the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love
he was not man. — Ayn Rand

Our love affairs with sin are not just a matter of morality, though, but of joy. This is not just about faithfulness to God, but about finding our deepest, most satisfying fulfillment. Many people think following Jesus means surrendering our happiness. You can either enjoy a fun, passionate, and exciting life here for a short time or live a bland, boring, but safe life forever with God. That lie is a quiet, but violent concentration camp, fencing men and women in, keeping them away from God, and torturing them with lesser pleasures that only lead to a swift and yet never-ending death. If you want to be truly happy - even in this life, surrounded by everything beautiful, fun, and exciting in this world - you want to be found with Jesus. — Marshall Segal

Almost every Bible conference majors on today's Church being like the Ephesian Church. We are told that, despite our sin and carnality, we are seated with Him. Alas, what a lie! We are Ephesians all right; but, as the Ephesian Church in the Revelation, we have 'left our first love!' We appease sin - but do not oppose it. To such a cold, carnal, critical, care-cowed Church, this lax, loose, lustful, licentious age will never capitulate. Let us stop looking for scapegoats. The fault in declining morality is not radio or television. The whole blame for the present international degeneration and corruption lies at the door of the Church! — Leonard Ravenhill

You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion. — Christopher Hitchens

[W]e conceive the Devil as a necessary part of a respectable view of cosmology. Ours is a divided empire in which certain ideas and emotions and actions are of God, and their opposites are of Lucifer. It is as impossible for most men to conceive of a morality without sin as of an earth without 'sky'. Since 1692 a great but superficial change has wiped out God's beard and the Devil's horns, but the world is still gripped between two diametrically opposed absolutes. The concept of unity, in which positive and negative are attributes of the same force, in which good and evil are relative, ever-changing, and always joined to the same phenomenon - such a concept is still reserved to the physical sciences and to the few who have grasped the history of ideas. — Arthur Miller

According to Gandhi, the seven sins are wealth without works, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice, and politics without principle. Well, Hubert Humphrey may have sinned in the eyes of God, as we all do, but according to those definitions of Gandhi's, it was Hubert Humphrey without sin. — Jimmy Carter

Talking about sexual morality, I wouldn't agree that it's declining, but it's certainly changing. Young and old, we are very much in the process of taking a fresh look at the whole issue of morality. The only decline that's taking place - and it's about time - is in the old puritanical concept that sex is equated with sin. — Johnny Carson

When you hear men talking," said Cornelia, "all they ever do is speak ill of women ... And I don't quite know how they managed to make this law in their favour, or who exactly it was who gave them a greater license to sin than is allowed to us; and if the fault is common to both sexes (as they can hardly deny), why should the blame not be as well? What makes them think they can boast of the same thing that in women brings only shame? — Moderata Fonte

The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable. — Patrick Henry

Oh, no, Cameron; I believe we're born free of sin and free of guilt. It's just that we all catch it, eventually. There are no clean rooms for morality, Cameron, no boys in bubbles kept in a guilt-free sterile zone. There are monasteries and nunneries, and people become recluses, but even that's just an elegant way of giving up. Washing one's hand didn't work two thousand years ago, and it doesn't work today. Involvement, Cameron, connection. — Iain Banks

If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness. — Criss Jami

Absolution is the washing away of sin. The promise of rebirth. And the chance to escape the transgressions of those who came before us. The best among us will learn from the mistakes of the past, while the rest seem doomed to repeat them. And then there are those who operate on the fringes of society, unburdened by the confines of morality and conscience. A ruthless breed of monsters whose deadliest weapon is their ability to hide in plain sight. If the people I've come to bring justice to cannot be bound by the quest for absolution, then neither will I. — Emily Thorne

He would have been careful not to violate his conscience in any way that might keep him from devoting his full attention to the sin he had decided to commit. Pedro was not really very different from all men, at least in that. Not very different from the bank teller who makes sure to give every customer exact change, even while he is embezzling. — Warren Eyster

The real help victims of injustice need is to get the will, skill and resources to fight back. There may or may not be a hell in afterlife but suffering injustice quietly is a sin, punishment for which is a living hell here and now. — R.N. Prasher

The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences. — Fulton J. Sheen

We Catholics have not only to do our best to keep down our own warring passions and live decent lives, which will often be hard enough in this odd world we have been born into. We have to bear witness to moral principles which the world owned yesterday and has begun to turn its back on today. We have to disapprove of some of the things our neighbors do, without being stuffy about it; we have to be charitable towards our neighbors and make great allowances for them, without falling into the mistake of condoning their low standards and so encouraging them to sin. Two of the most difficult and delicate tasks a man can undertake; and it happens, nowadays, not only to priests, to whom it comes as part of their professional duty, but to ordinary lay people...So we must know what are the unalterable principles we hold, and why we hold them; we must see straight in a world that is full of moral fog. — Ronald Knox

In reality, mankind is still metaphysically in God's likeness, but
God's image in mankind has been altered by sin. We can no longer
duplicate or reflect God's attitudes as we once could do. That is, we can
no longer be holy as God is holy. Our morality has been altered and no
longer has the capability to duplicate or reflect God's image. So what is
the answer? Can this image be repaired or made whole again? The answer
is, YES! — Reid A. Ashbaucher