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Quote by Lailah Gifty Akita

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Lailah Gifty Akita

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“Failure, it occurred to him, was the secular equivalent of sin. Modern secular man was born into a world whose moral framework was composed not of laws and duties, but of tests and comparisons. There were no absolute outside standards, so standards had to generate themselves from within, relativistically. One's natural sense of inadequacy could be kept at bay only pious acts of repeated successfulness. And failure was more terrifying than sin. Sin could be repented of by an act of volition; failure could not be disposed of so easily.”

“The sinner I was expecting was guilty of pride, lust and spiritual despair, not merely of sloth and ineptitude. This was the diary of a nobody. So I nearly censored January to June 1933 in the interests of Grandpa's glamour as a Gothic personage. But in truth this is what we should be exposed to - the awful knowledge that when they're not breaking the commandments, the anti-heroes are mending their tobacco pipes and listening to the wireless.”

“Sin acts as if God's original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didn't quite pan out, God offered his grace--but only the bare minimum--to make good the difference. This is exactly backwards. God's boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows.”

“Purpose, meaning, and hope are the edge of a coin; on one side is imprinted the image of God; and on the other is self … As complicated as life seems at times, the mystery of fulfillment and the paradox of contentment are as simple as that. What makes life complicated, I suspect, isn’t the choice between these two value systems and the paths they define, sin and holiness, so much as it is our unwillingness to make the choice between the two.”