A Quote by Hermann Hesse

Never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner.

Hermann Hesse

Quote Topics

Man Never Saint Sinner Wholly

Quote Author

Hermann Hesse
German - Novelist
July 2, 1877 - August 9, 1962

Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity. When the Illustrious Buddha taught about the world, he had to divide it into Samsara and Nirvana, illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. One cannot do otherwise, there is no other method for those who teach. But the world itself, being in and around us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed wholly Samsara or wholly Nirvana; never is a man wholly a saint or a sinner. This only seems so because we suffer the illusion that time is something real.

Hermann Hesse

You cannot make a sinner into a saint by killing him. He who does not live as a saint here will never live as a saint hereafter.

Charles Spurgeon

Guilt simply says that you are a sinner. And the feeling of shame simply shows you that you need not be a sinner, that you are meant to be a saint. If you are a sinner it is only because of your unconsciousness; you are not a sinner because the society follows a certain morality and you are not following it.

Rajneesh

The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future.

Oscar Wilde

I wish people wouldn't think of me as a saint - unless they agree with the definition of a saint that a saint's a sinner who goes on trying.

Aung San Suu Kyi

I've been a sinner and a saint. If you've been a saint all your life, it's pretty easy to sleep at night. If you've been a sinner, you're just as comfortable in it.

Killer Mike

Whenever anybody called Nelson Mandela a saint, he would say: "If by saint you mean a sinner who is trying to be better, then I'm a saint."

Kumi Naidoo

If somebody murders somewhere, I have a part in it. Even if I am a sleeper - I was sleeping, I don´t know about the man, I will never hear about him - and somebody somewhere, in the Himalayas, commits a murder, if we are not individuals I have a part in it, I am also responsible. It is not so easy to throw the responsibility: "I am not committing a murder, I am a saint." No saint is a saint because every sinner is implied in him.

Rajneesh

The weakest believer and the strongest saint are alike equally justified. Justification admits no degrees. A man is either wholly justified or wholly condemned in the sight of God.

C. J. Mahaney

As a general rule, people who flagrantly pretend to anything are the reverse of that which they pretend to. A man who sets up for a saint is sure to be a sinner; and a man who boasts that he is a sinner is sure to have some feeble, maudlin, snivelling bit of saintship about him which is enough to make him a humbug.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A saint is a sinner who never gave up.

Paramahansa Yogananda

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I am not a saint, unless you think of a saint as a sinner who keeps on trying.

Nelson Mandela

I've been a sinner and a saint. If you've been a saint all your life, it's pretty easy to sleep at night. If you've been a sinner, you're just as comfortable in it. I've walked both sides of the fence, and there are times I can't sleep and I wake the engineer up and get it out of me. But it usually doesn't pour all the way out. I have to come back and have the conversation that you usually try not to have with yourself. That's how it gets resolved.

Killer Mike

God knows I'm no saint, but I don't think I'm more of a sinner than any other man.