A Quote by Mortimer Adler

Sin is not only manifested in certain acts that are forbidden by divine command. Sin also appears in attitudes and dispositions and feelings. Lust and hate are sins as well as adultery and murder. And, in the traditional Christian view, despair and chronic boredom - unaccompanied by any vicious act - are serious sins. They are expressions of man's separation from God, as the ultimate good, meaning, and end of human existence.

Mortimer Adler

Quote Topics

Act Acts Adultery Also Any Appears Attitudes Boredom Certain Christian Chronic Command Despair Divine End Existence Expressions Feelings Forbidden God Good Hate Human Human Existence Lust Man Meaning Murder Only Separation Serious Sin Sins Traditional Ultimate Vicious View Well

Quote Author

Mortimer Adler
American - Philosopher
December 28, 1902 - June 28, 2001

Men perish with whispering sins-nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience that they are sins, as often with crying sins; and in hell there shall meet as many men that never thought what was sin, as that spent all their thoughts in the compassing of sin.

John Donne

Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair.

David Novak

Little sins carry with them but little temptations to sin, and then a man shews most viciousness and unkindness, when he sins on a little temptation. It is devilish to sin without a temptation; it is little less than devilish to sin on a little occasion. The less the temptation is to sin, the greater is that sin.

Thomas Brooks

In the deepest sense, the being in a state of sin is the sin, the particular sins are not the continuation of sin, they are expressions of its continuation.

Soren Kierkegaard

Confession of sins is not meritorious: to confess sins as a way of placing God in your debt is not dealing with sin; it is committing another sin. The context of all confession must be the free grace of justification.

Douglas Wilson

Sins are timeless. Sins are an everyday reality for every one. Sin has been in existence since the beginning of man, since Adam and Eve. It will always be pertinent.

Carine Roitfeld

The sin of pride is the sin of sins; in which all subsequent sins are included, as in their germ; they are but the unfolding of this one.

Richard Chenevix Trench

All errors are just ordinary, what extraordinary sin can you commit? All the sins have been committed already. You cannot find a new sin - it is very difficult, it is almost impossible to be original about sin. For millions of years people have committed everything that can be committed. To be thrown in hell for your sins. Now this is too much! you can throw a man into hell for five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years. If a man has lived for seventy years you can throw him there for seventy years.and that is if you only believe in one life. It is good that they believe in one life.

Rajneesh

It is an end with priests and gods, if man becomes scientific. Moral: science is the thing forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden. Science is the first sin, the germ of all sin, original sin. This alones is mortality: Thou shalt not know.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

Soren Kierkegaard

The indulgence of one sin opens the door to further sins. The indulgence of one sin diverts the soul from the use of those means by which all other sins should be resisted.

John Owen

God may not accept a person to forgive him his sins, without an atonement, else he must give free license to sin both in angels and men, and then sin were no sin, and our God were no God.

John Wycliffe

To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.

George MacDonald

We are saved from nothing if we are not saved from sin. Little sins are pioneers of hell. The backslider begins with what he foolishly considers trifling with little sins. There are no little sins. There was a time when all the evil that has existed in the world was comprehended in one sinful thought of our first parent; and all the now evil is the numerous and horrid progeny of one little sin.