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Original Sin Quotes

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Original Sin Quotes

“Robert Ingersoll's character was as nearly perfect as it is possible for the character of mortal man to be... none sweeter or nobler had ever blessed the world. The example of his life was of more value to posterity than all the sermons that were ever written on the doctrine of original sin... The genius for humor and wit and satire of a Voltaire, a wide amplitude of imagination, and a greatness of heart and brain that placed him upon an equal footing with the greatest thinkers of antiquity. He stands, at the close of his career, the first great reformer of the age. {Thomas' words at the funeral of the great Robert Ingersoll}”

LifeCharacterHumorImaginationPerfectExampleSweetGeniusHonorBlessingRespectPerfectionPraiseValueNobleWitManSatireAdmirationBlessSermonsPosterityAntiquityReformerOriginal SinGreatestMortalIngersollVoltaireRobert G IngersollRobert IngersollRobert Green Ingersoll
Author:Charles Spalding Thomas
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“We've heard them all talk about Dust, and they're so afraid of it, and you know what? We believed them, even though we could see that what they were doing was wicked and evil and wrong... We thought Dust must be bad too, because they were grown up and they said so. But what if it isn't? What if it's—' She said breathlessly, 'Yeah! What if it's really good...”

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Book:The Golden Compass
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“A Christian is bound by his very creed to suspect evil, and cannot release himself. His religion has brought evil to light in a way in which it never 'was before; it has shown its depth, subtlety, ubiquity; and a revelation, full of mercy on the one hand, is terrible in its exposure of the world's real state on the other. The Gospel fastens the sense of evil upon the mind; a Christian is enlightened, hardened, sharpened, as to evil; he sees it where others do not. . . . . He owns the doctrine of original sin; that doctrine puts him necessarily on his guard against all appearances, sustains his apprehension under perplexity, and prepares him for recognizing anywhere what he knows to be everywhere.”

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Book:Essays on Freedom and Power
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“And there is further testimony, so extensive and so powerful that it seems unpardonable to ignore it. Our corruptibility is not contingent. We pretend to know this but rarely examine the relevance of this knowledge to our hopes. We pretend to know that nothing is evergreen, that each source of life is eventually exhausted and each concentration of energy eventually dispersed. We pretend to know that the biological process of life itself is the source of anxiety, conflict, aggression, uncertainty, concern. We pretend to know that no consistent system of values is possible and that at every step values that we consider important become mutually exclusive when we attempt their practical application to individual cases; tragedy, the moral victory of evil, is always possible. We pretend to know that reason often hampers our ability to liberate our energies, that moments of joy are more often than not wrested from intellectual lucidity. We pretend to know that creation is a struggle of man against himself and, more often than not, against others also, that the bliss of love lies in hopeful dissatisfaction, that in our world, death is the only total unity. We pretend to know why our noble motives slide into evil results, why our will toward good emerges from pride, hatred ,vanity, envy, personal ambition. We pretend to know that most of life consists in taking flight from reality and concealing this reality from ourselves. We pretend to know that our efforts to improve the world are constrained by the narrow limits defined by our biological structure and by the pressures of the past which have molded us and which we cannot leave very far behind. All these things, which we pretend to be aware of, compose the reality of original sin---and yet it is this reality that we attempt to deny.”

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Author:Leszek Kołakowskik
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“It follows if sexual naiveté and inexperience is virtuous, being apt at—or even having more than the most rudimentary knowledge of—sex is indicative of being a bad Christian. In this respect, ignorance and inability are honorable traits as opposed to easily remedied shortcomings but, then again, Christianity’s foundation rests on the precept that knowledge is the first, i.e., Original, and foremost wrong, i.e., Sin.”

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Author:Michael Gurnow
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“The story of the Fall tells us in mythical language that "original sin" is not simply a stigma arbitrarily making good pleasures seem guilty, but a basic inauthenticity, a kind of predisposition to bad faith in our understanding of ourselves and of the world. It implies a determined willfulness in trying to make things be other than they are in order that we may be able to make them subserve, at any moment, to our individual desire for pleasure or for power. But since things do not obey our arbitrary impulsions, and since we cannot make the world correspond to and confirm the image of it dictated by our needs and illusions, our willfulness is inseparable from error and from suffering. Hence, Buddhism says, deluded life itself is in a state of Dukkha, and every movement of desire tends to bear ultimate fruit in pain rather than lasting joy, in hate rather than love, in destruction rather than creation. (Let us note in passing that when technological skill seems in fact to give man almost absolute power in manipulating the world, this fact is no way reverses his original condition of brokenness and error but only makes it all the more obvious. We who live in the age of the H-bomb and the extermination camp have reason to reflect on this, though such reflection is a bit unpopular.)”

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Book:Zen and the Birds of Appetite
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“Original sin and conscious awareness of human fallibility is the perpetual agent of transformation in human affairs. Humankind’s behavior is pathological; it is an admixture of instinct and reason, kindness and cruelty, immorality and seeking redemption.”

ReasonQuotesChangeFreedomSinConsciousnessKindnessHuman NatureRegretBehaviorTransformationSelf AwarenessInstinctCrueltyRedemptionFree WillHumankindRegretsSelf TransformationOriginal SinConsciousness QuotesConscious AwarenessTransformation QuotesRegret QuotesHuman ErrorRegretfulRedeemHuman Nature Quotes
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“At one stupendous evolutionary moment in pre-history, one of nature's creatures separated himself from the unconscious flowing and burgeoning of nature and became conscious of himself. Prometheus stole fire. Adam ate the apple. Man sundered his bond with nature and set himself on a course of conscious individuation. In his mythologies, man has forever after felt guilt about that sundering. For when he became conscious of himself, man was able to choose between good and evil, and he realized that he was flawed, striving for good but prone to evil. He had taken a momentous step forward, but something in him, and in his myths, still longed for the half-remembered union with unconscious nature, that innocence lost long ago.”

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Book:Wagner's Ring Turning the Sky Round
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“Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam's curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. The whole earth is our hospital Endowed by the ruined millionaire, Wherein, if we do well, we shall Die of the absolute paternal care That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere. The chill ascends from feet to knees, The fever sings in mental wires. If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars. - (from 'East Coker')”

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Book:Four Quartets
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“Sin, when in the body, cannot not stay put. It's not a guest that stays in one room, making sure not to disturb the others. It is a tenant that lives in everything and goes everywhere. It can bleed into every part, choking out anything holy. The glass shattered and broke when it moved in. Adam and Eve, God's first image-bearers, made to love and reflect God in creation, had now become the world's first sinners.”

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Book:Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been
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“In a garden long ago, the two majestic beings God had created used their capacities for purposes other than reflecting the goodness of their Creator. Adam and Eve commandeered their design to worship themselves instead of God. Their children and grandchildren have been doing the same ever since.”

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Book:The Dynamic Heart in Daily Life: Connecting Christ to Human Experience
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“We are not as some people like to assume nowadays 'just being real' by embracing passively the sinful, fallen versions of ourselves. Quite the opposite really: our true selves were, from the beginning, intended to resemble the example which was then set by Christ Jesus; hence God wants to restore us to how we would have been had original sin never once befell.”

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Book:Healology
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“Theosophists for instance will preach an obviously attractive idea like re-incarnation; but if we wait for its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.”

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Author:G. K. Chesterton
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“One of the effects of original sin is an instinctive prejudice in favour of our own selfish desires. We see things as they are not, because we see them centered on ourselves. Fear, anxiety, greed, ambition and our hopeless need for pleasure all distort the image of reality that is reflected in our minds. Grace does not completely correct this distortion all at once: but it gives us a means of recognizing and allowing for it. And it tells us what we must do to correct it. Sincerity must be bought at a price: the humility to recognize our innumerable errors, and fidelity in tirelessly setting them right.”

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Book:No Man Is an Island
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“when the serpent breathed the poison of his pride, the desire to be as God, into the hearts of our first parents, that they too fell from their high estate into all the wretchedness in which man is now sunk. In heaven and earth, pride, self-exaltation, is the gate and the birth, and the curse, of hell.”

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Book:Humility: The Journey Toward Holiness – Classic Devotional Meditations on the Character of Christ
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“In today’s world, it is okay to assault anyone, but offending someone? That is the crime of the highest degree. Wonder why there isn’t a death penalty for that yet? Oh, wait there is. They call it blasphemy and apostasy in the middle east. They aren’t wrong; you know? What was the original sin, after all, if not offending the Abrahamic God?”

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Book:The World's Most Frustrated Man
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“Tunazaliwa, kuteseka na kufa kwa sababu ya dhambi ya asili ya wazazi wetu wa kwanza (Adamu na Hawa). Kama Hawa asingekubali kudanganywa na Shetani, tungezaliwa bila uchungu, tungeishi bila kuteseka na tusingekufa milele. Lakini haya ndiyo mawazo yangu: Mungu Ahusiki na dhambi, Ahusiki na mwili, Anahusika na roho. Hivyo, mtu anapofariki mwili unabaki duniani lakini roho inarudi kwa Mungu; kwani Yeye ndiye aliyeitengeneza na kuiweka katika moyo wa mtu. Mimi na wewe ni viumbe vyenye thamani kubwa sana mbele za Mwenyezi Mungu; mapenzi Yake kwetu hayana masharti yoyote. Hainiingii akilini (hata kidogo) kumtesa mtu unayempenda kiasi hicho milele, wakati uwezo wa kumwokoa unao.”

SoulGodBodyManSatanLabourMy ThoughtsUnconditionalAdam And EveAlmighty GodMunguOriginal SinHimShetaniMtuMe And YouMwenyezi MunguMwiliRohoKufaAdamu Na HawaTo DieOur First ParentsWazazi Wetu Wa KwanzaHuman S HeartDhambi Ya AsiliHayana Masharti YoyoteHis Love To UsKutesekaMapenzi Yake KwetuMawazo YanguMimi Na WeweMoyo Wa MtuTo SufferTunazaliwaUchunguWe Are BornYeye
Author:Enock Maregesi
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“When Saint Augustine was formulating his doctrine of Original Sin, all he had to do was look at people as they are originally. Originally, they’re children. Saint Augustine may have had a previous job – unmentioned in his Confessions – as a preschool day-care provider. But it’s wrong to use infantile as a pejorative. It’s the other way around. What children display is adultishness. Children are, for example, perfectly adultish in their self-absorption. Tiny tots look so wise, staring at their stuffed animals. You wonder what they’re thinking. Then they learn to talk. What they’re thinking is, My Beanie Baby!”

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Author:P.J. O'Rourke
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“The rising influence of lay piety is particularly marked upon the Mariological controversies of the late medieval period. Two rival positions developed: the maculist position, which held that Mary was subject to original sin, in common with every other human being; and the immaculist position, which held that contrary view that Mary was in some way preserved from original sin, and was thus to be considered sinless. The maculist position was regarded as firmly established within the High Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. The veneration of the Virgin within popular piety, however, proved to have an enormously creative power that initially challenged, and subsequently triumphed over, the academic objections raised against it by university theologians.”

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Book:The Intellectual Origins of the European Reformation
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“But, being Himself at once God and man, His flesh and soul were and are holy - and beyond holy. God is holy, just as He was and is and shall be, and the Virgin is immaculate, without spot or stain, and so, too, was that rib which was taken from Adam. However, the rest of humanity, even though they are His brothers and kin according to the flesh, yet remained even as they were, of dust, and did not immediately become holy and sons of God.”

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Book:On the Mystical Life: The Ethical Discourses : On Virtue and Christian Life Vol. 2
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“History here is always a comedy, and not a tragedy: the tragic is before or after, and in any case outside of, temporal life; this life itself realizes a program fixed beforehand and therefore, taken in itself, has neither any meaning nor any value.”

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Book:Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit
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“There was no more reasonable sequitur between “provocation” and “reaction” in the case of the French Revolution than in the case of the Jews and the Nazis, the Armenians and the young Turks, the old Russian regime, the Kerensky interlude and bolshevism, Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and the horrors perpetrated by savage monsters of Holden Roberto’s “Liberation Front,” the Belgian administration in the Congo and the delirious atrocities of Gbenye and Mulele, British colonialism in Kenya and the Mau-Mau. We have to face the fact that man is not “good”—only the extraordinary man is, only the heroic saint or the saintly hero, while the noble savage belongs to the world of fairy tales.”

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Book:Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot
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“Bet vai tu zini par manu bērnību? Vai tu zini, cik man bija sliktas mājas un cik daudz ļauna es tur dabūju iemācīties? Šķiet, ka tas nāk līdzi mantojumā, no citiem augumiem, bet no kā? No pirmā auguma, tā bija rakstīts bērnu grāmatās, un liekas, ka piepildās... Tāpēc nevaino mani, tad es savukārt nevainošu savus vecākus, kuri varētu vainot savējos un tā joprojām!”

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Author:August Strindberg
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“Every father is given the opportunity to corrupt his daughter's nature, and the educator, husband, or psychiatrist then has to face the music. For what has been spoiled by the father can only be made good by a father, just as what has been spoiled by the mother can only be repaired by a mother. The disastrous repetition of the family pattern could be described as the psychological original sin, or as the curse of the Atrides running through the generations.”

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Book:Mysterium coniunctionis, an inquiry into the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy
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“When virtue is pictured as innocence and innocence equated with childlikeness, the implication is obviously that knowledge and experience are no longer media of goodness, but have become in themselves contaminating. This is a very despairing outlook, in its way as black as Augustine's original sin, for it supposes that original goodness will in all likelihood be defiled...It surrenders the attempt to represent virtue in a mature phase.”

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Book:Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism
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