Quotes
Quotes about Sin
Modern Americans are so exposed, peered at, inquired about, and spied upon as to be increasingly without privacy--members of a ;naked society and denizens of a goldfish bowl.
Don't draw another's bow, don't ride another's horse, don't mind another's business.
The foolish and wicked practice of profane cursing and swearing is a vice so mean and low that every person of sense and character detests and despises it.
All rising to great place is by a winding stair.
With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster 13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress.
Between today and tomorrow are graves, and between promising and fulfilling are chasms.
Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.
Prosperity is something the businessmen created for politicians to take credit for.
The asses' bridge. [Lat., Pons Asinorum.]
To throw a blot on a man's reputation by praising him.
To say that which is instructive and also pleasing.
God made bees, and bees made honey, God made man, and man made money, Pride made the devil, and the devil made sin; So God made a cole-pit to put the devil in. - transcribed by James Henry Dixon,
There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.
Every once in a while someone without a single bad habit gets caught.
From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step.
Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven.
It is by becoming increasingly complex that the self might be said to grow.
...ideas have a tendency to live lives of their own, and having become a part of tradition, they are very difficult to root out. When summarized in a few neat words or phrases, these gems of wisdom become substitutes for thought, and gradually take on much of the status of revealed truth. Occasionally, some iconoclast sees fit to challenge one of them, and a brief flurry ensues, after which things go on about as before. It is easy to think of plenty of ideas that are passing, if they have not already passed, beyond the stage of effective discussion.
Since the social victim has been oppressed by society, he comes to feel that his individual life will be improved more by changes in society than by his own initiative. Without realizing it, he makes society rather than himself the agent of change. The power he finds in his victimization may lead him to collective action against society, but it also encourages passivity within the sphere of his personal life.
Thought control, like birth control, is best undertaken as long as possible before the fact. Many grown-ups will obstinately persist, if only now and then, in composing small strings of sentences in their heads and achieving at least momentary logic. This probably cannot be prevented, but we have learned how to minimize the consequences by arranging that such grown-ups will be unable to pursue that logic very far. If they were at home in the technology of writing, there's no telling how much social disorder they would cause by thinking things out at length.Our schools have chosen to cut this danger off as close to the root as possible, thus taking measures to preclude not only the birth of thought but its conception. They give the pill to even the youngest children, but just to be on the safe side, they give it to everybody else, too, especially all would-be schoolteachers.
...the conviction persists - though history has shown it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place.
The natural inclination of a child is to take pleasure in the use of the mind no less than of the body. The child's primary business is learning. It is also the primary entertainment. To retain that orientation into adulthood, so that consciousness is not a burden but a joy, is the mark of the successfully developed human being.
Implicit in the activist conception of government is the assumption that you can take the good things in a complex system for granted, and just improve the things that are not so good. What is lacking in this conception is any sense that a society, an institution, or even a single human being, is an intricate system of fragile inter-relationships, whose complexities are little understood and easily destabilized.
Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it genius wastes its efforts in a maze of inconsistencies.
A man is never more his single separate self than when he sets out on a journey.
