Cerulean Sins Quotes

I sipped my own coffee, heavy on the sugar and cream, trying to make up for the late work the night before. Caffeine and sugar, the two basic food groups. ~ Laurell K. Hamilton

People can perfect whatever facade they want, but everyone holds their sins close to their skin. ~ Jeaniene Frost

The blood of Jesus did not merely "cover" the sins of your wicked heart ... leaving a stain! It completely remove them all wiping them out as if they never existed there in the first place! It's called redemption! ~ John Paul Warren

In the realm of evil thoughts none induces to sin as much as do thoughts that concern the pleasure of the flesh. ~ Thomas Aquinas

It's the worst of your sins, hating basketball when you're so damn good at it. ~ Trinity Faegen

Take words with you and return to the LORD. Say to him: "Forgive all our sins and receive us graciously, that we may offer the fruit of our lips." HOSEA 14: 2 ~ Anne Graham Lotz

The Cross isn't an ornament, mere symbol. It's the mystery of God's love, that He died for our sins. ~ Pope Francis

It is a hot summer day in Tennessee in the midst of the sixth decade of this century. The girl has climbed the fence to get to the swimming hole she has visited so many summers of her life in the time before this part of the land was enclosed. She stands now at the edge of it. Her body is sticky with heat. The surface of the water moves slightly. Sunlight shimmers and dances in a green reflection that seems as she stares at it to pull her in even before her skin is wet with it. Drops of water on the infant's head. All the body immersed for baptism. Do these images come to her as she sinks into the coolness? The washing of hands before Sunday's midday meal. All our sins washed away. Water was once the element for purification. But at the bottom of this pool, There is no telling what is there now. This is what the girl's father will say to her finally: corroded cans of chemical waste, some radioactive substances. That was why they put the fence there. She is not thinking of that now. The words have not yet been said, and so for her no trouble exists here. The water holds up her body. She is weightless in this fulsome element, the waves her body makes embracing her with their own benediction. Beneath her in the shadowy green, she feels the depth of the pond. In this coolness as the heat mercifully abates, her mind is set free, to dream as the water dreams. ~ Susan Griffin

Jesus came into the world to save us from our sins, and our political sins are not exempt from this salvation. Why would our political sins (which frequently have been among our foulest sins) be excluded? Jesus ~ Douglas Wilson

To love God more is never to love people less. It's to love people best. It's to relieve them of the responsibility of being your false Christ. It's to keep their sins against you from being unforgivable and your sins against them from being ignorable. It's to guard them from our mean-streaks and strong human tendencies to respond to disappointment with punishment. It's to keep the people close by from cutting their wrists on the razor-sharp blades of our insecurities. It's to dull the edge of our cravings to be adored. It's to untie the double knots of codependency. It's to let the affirmations of others be the overflow and not the essential source of our emotional survival. To love God is to guard man. ~ Beth Moore

Bind up thy words that they run not riot, and grow wanton, and gather up sins for themselves in too much talking. Let them be rather confined, and held back within their own banks. An overflowing river quickly gathers mud. ~ Saint Ambrose

Newspapers ... give us the bald, sordid, disgusting facts of life. They chronicle, with degrading avidity, the sins of the second-rate, and with the conscientiousness of the illiterate give us accurate and prosaic details ... ~ Oscar Wilde

The way to God was opened, not by the life of Jesus or the example of Jesus, not even by the teaching of Jesus, but by the death of Jesus on the cross. "For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God. ... " (1 Peter 3:18). ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

There are some wounds unreachable by words, some sins immune to apology. ~ Amy Hatvany

Long before there were effective treatments, physicians dispensed prognoses, hope, and, above all, meaning. When something terrible happens-and serious disease is always terrible-people want to know why. In a pantheistic world, the explanation was simple-one god had caused the problem, another could cure it. In the time since people have been trying to get along with only one God, explaining disease and evil has become more difficult. Generations of theologians have wrestled with the problem of theodicy-how can a good God allow such bad things to happen to good people?

Darwinian medicine can't offer a substitute for such explanations. It can't provide a universe in which events are part of a divine plan, much less one in which individual illness reflects individual sins. It can only show us why we are the way we are, why we are vulnerable to certain diseases. A Darwinian view of medicine simultaneously makes disease less and more meaningful. Diseases do not result from random or malevolent forces, they arise ultimately from past natural selection. Paradoxically, the same capacities that make us vulnerable to disease often confer benefits. The capacity for suffering is a useful defense. Autoimmune disease is a price of our remarkable ability to attack invaders. Cancer is the price of tissues that can repair themselves. Menopause may protect the interests of our genes in existing children. Even senescence and death are not random, but compromises struck by natural s ~ Randolph M. Nesse

The Sultan tapped his tented fingers, staring into the distance. Suddenly, he lunged toward me, took hold of my wrist, and pulled me roughly down to sit on the cushion beside him. "This . . . mermaid," he said through clenched teeth, leaning in so close to me that I could smell the mint on his breath. "The one who sang to the king at night." His voice was fierce, but quiet. I couldn't tell if anyone but me could hear. "How . . ." he began. "How did she think of the king . . . in her heart?"
I glanced quickly up at his face and saw there a look that took me by surprise. An oddly soft, vulnerable, hurting look. The look of a man who might cry out in his sleep at night, like a child. But then the stony mask slid back.
"Did she despise him," the Sultan asked, "for making her sing for her life each night? Did she only pretend affection to save her own skin? Did she . . . loathe him for what he had done before, to his other wives? For his . . . sins?"
"No, my lord," I said softly. "She loved him."
"Do you swear it?" He gripped my wrist harder, until it hurt.
"Yes, my lord. She told me - " I stopped, corrected myself. "She told the mermaid with the broken fin. She said the king - the merman king, my lord - she said that he had a deep hurting inside him. She said that she wanted to soothe him. And when the mermaid with the broken fin . . . questioned how the queen could love him - because of the things you just said, my lord - the queen said, 'I'm not ashamed ~ Susan Fletcher

But do you give it to Him daily, Rachel? Do you make the choice every day to live for Him? Because justification for all of your sins was a one-time deal, done on the cross, but the sanctification He's working out in your life? A daily thing. A dying to self thing. A choice to live for Him and for what He wants to do in you rather than waiting for some man to come along, love you, and fill a need that Christ alone can fill. ~ Jenn Faulk

[ ... ]we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

A perfectly routine piece of news: "Last night our planes attacked Dresden. All planes returned safely." The only good German is a dead one: over one hundred thousand evil men, women, and children (the able-bodied were at the fronts) forever purged of their sins against humanity. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You may be asking yourselves, 'Who is this man standing before us?' i would like to reply to that question with something absolutely certain about my own life: The man standing before you is a man who has been forgiven. A man who was, and is, saved from his many sins. ~ Pope Francis

A sin is two sins when it is defended. ~ Henry Smith

And this is the result. Millions of small sins, billions of tiny evils--twisting, twining, groping, consuming...Till they become a great serpent...a blight on humanity...that rises from the collective unconscious towering over the world...Blocking out the light. It is so convenient to blame it all on some sneering, arrogant Satan--sitting on a fiery throne, plotting to corrupt our souls. But if there is a devil--he's just another projection of our own sins. ~ Jeff Lemire

The careless, the lukewarm Catholics should, above all, dread hell, for he is continually walking on the brink of the infernal abyss. He makes little of the precepts of hearing Mass, of the prescribed abstinence from flesh meat, he scruples not neglecting the religious training of his children, he associates with persons and frequents places that are to him an occasion of sin, he yields to impure thoughts, commits sins of impurity without remorse, gives way to his vindictive feelings against his neighbor, indulges in excess in eating and drinking, neglects prayer and the sacraments. Now is the time for him to be aroused from his life of sin, now is the time for him to give up sin and change his life, for if he defers doing so, it may soon be to late. This may, indeed, be the last warning that God gives him. ~ Fr. Martin Von Cochem

No one could preach if he seriously looked at his own sins. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Be careful how you live your life, there is judgement. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In the Quran it is said that from the tears shed by this great angel [Michael] over the sins of the faithful, cherubim are formed. ~ Malcolm Godwin

Hell is not a place you go for your sins. It is where you are when you are not sharing the gifts you were given. ~ Jeffrey Fry

Of course, if Saint Peter could come out today upon these streets below he would find all he could wish, voices from nowhere, music from unpopulated boxes, men ascending divine distances in gas balloons, and traveling at the speed of sound, apparitions from nowhere appear on the screen; the sick are raised from the dead, life is prolonged so that every detail of pain may be relished, the blind are given eyes and the cripples forced to walk, and there is an item which can blow a city of the beloved enemy into a place where their sins will be brought home to them, with of course as much noise as the trumpets on the walls of Jericho ~ William Gaddis

If all it took was someone proclaiming I believe Jesus Christ and that he died for my sins, and that was all there was to it, people wouldn't have to keep coming to church, would they. ~ Barack Obama

Child, child, love while you can
The voice and the eyes and the soul of a man;
Never fear though it break your heart-
Out of the wound new joy will start;
Only love proudly and gladly and well,
Though love be heaven or love be hell.
Child, child, love while you may,
For life is short as a happy day;
Never fear the thing you feel-
Only by love is life made real;
Love, for the deadly sins are seven,
Only through love will you enter heaven. ~ Sara Teasdale

This re-appearance of the doctrine of freewill serves to support that of the pretension of the natural man to be not irremediably fallen, for this is what such doctrine tends to. All who have never been deeply convicted of sin, all persons in whom this conviction is based on gross external sins, believe more or less in freewill ~ John Nelson Darby

There are times when one is tempted to say that the great, sprawling, lethargic sin of Sloth is the oldest and greatest of the sins and the parent of all the rest. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

A person who sins neither in thought nor deed, and is fair and just, gains enormous courage and strength. As a leader, you need courage born of integrity in order to be capable of powerful leadership. To achieve this courage, you must search your heart, and make sure your conscience is clear and your behavior is beyond reproach. ~ Konosuke Matsushita

Jesus' call to bear the cross places all who follow him in the community of the forgiveness of sins. Forgiving sins is the Christ-suffering required of his disciples. It is required of all Christians. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back
in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. ~ Frederick Buechner

As Francesco Datini of Prato did a century before, Pacioli advises merchants to incorporate explicit signs of Christianity into their books as a way of legitimising their profit-seeking activities. The use of double entry itself was like the Catholic confession: if a merchant confessed - or accounted for - all his world activities before God, then perhaps his sins would be absolved. These Christian flourishes that Pacioli recommends merchants include in their books are therefore no mere ornaments. ~ Jane Gleeson-White

Look closely upon your shadow, it too is filled full with your sins, just as you are. It's silence of them does not mean it has forgiven your." - R.E. Fisher ~ R.E. Fisher

Michael Horton gets at the heart of this: "The heart of most religions is good advice, good techniques, good programs, good ideas, and good support systems. . . . But the heart of Christianity is Good News. It comes not as a task for us to fulfill, a mission for us to accomplish, a game plan for us to follow with the help of life coaches, but as a report that someone else has already fulfilled, accomplished, followed, and achieved everything for us. Good advice may help us in daily direction; the Good News concerning Jesus Christ saves us from sin's guilt and tyranny over our lives and the fear of death. It's Good News because it does not depend on us. It is about God and his faithfulness to his own purposes and promises. ~ Matt Perman

13 But encourage each other daily, while it is still called today, so that none of you is hardened by sin's deception. ~ Anonymous

I HAD learned early in my career that one can do wrong against one's will, and before long I also learned that one can do wrong without ever discovering what one has done or why it was wrong. There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that ~ George Orwell

Haunt me,
my little ghost,
Posses me
Live inside me,
And scare away my sins
Until there's nothing left.
But You. ~ Nyrae Dawn

My friends, ask gladness from God. Be glad as children, as birds in the sky. And let man's sin not disturb you in your efforts, do not feat that it will dampen your endeavor and keep it from being fulfilled, do not say, "Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being fulfilled." Flee from such despondency, my children! There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for the sins of men. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The SEC does way more good than harm - the last thing I would do is get rid of the SEC ... if accounting were thoroughly fixed, a lot of other sins would go away. We're paying a huge price for deterioration of accounting. ~ Charlie Munger

I don't think you do,' said Father Brown, with simplicity. 'You say this thing was done by spiritual powers. What spiritual powers? You don't think the holy angels took him and hung him on a garden tree, do you? And as for the unholy angels - no, no, no. The men who did this did a wicked thing, but they went no further than their own wickedness; they weren't wicked enough to be dealing with spiritual powers. I know something about Satanism, for my sins; I've been forced to know. I know what it is, what it practically always is. It's proud and it's sly. It likes to be superior; it loves to horrify the innocent with things half understood, to make children's flesh creep. That's why it's so fond of mysteries and initiations and secret societies and all the rest of it. Its eyes are turned inwards, and however grand and grave it may look, it's always hiding a small, mad smile. ~ G.K. Chesterton