Root Of Sin Quotes

I have a pastor friend who says the root of sin is the desire for control. I think there's some truth to that. And I'd add the root of control is fear. ~ Donald Miller

A man may beat down the bitter fruit from an evil tree until he is weary; while the root abides in strength and vigour, the beating down of the present fruit will not hinder it from bringing forth more. This is the folly of some men; they set themselves with all earnestness and diligence against the appearing eruption of lust, but, leaving the principle and root untouched, perhaps unsearched out, they make but little or no progress in this work of mortification. ~ John Owen

Everything at some point has been declared the root of all evil. ~ Criss Jami

Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. Modern ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

The theme is the theme of humiliation, which is the square root of sin, as opposed to the freedom from humiliation, and love, which is the square root of wonderful. ~ Carson McCullers

The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted ... Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

At the root of all power and motion, there is music and rhythm, the play of patterned frequencies against the matrix of time. We know that every particle in the physical universe takes its characteristics from the pitch and pattern and overtones of its particular frequencies, its singing. Before we make music, music makes us. ~ Joachim-Ernst Berendt

For me, one of the major reasons to move beyond just the planting of trees was that I have tendency to look at the causes of a problem. We often preoccupy ourselves with the symptoms, whereas if we went to the root cause of the problems, we would be able to overcome the problems once and for all. ~ Wangari Maathai

Though man comes from the dust, sin is not a part of his nature. Man can overcome sin, and through repentance attain to at-one-ment with his Maker. ~ Joseph Hertz

It isn't about the welfare check. It never was.
It isn't about sexual permissiveness, or personal morality, or failures in parenting, or lack of family planning. All of these are inherent in the disaster, but the purposefulness with which babies make babies in places like West Baltimore goes far beyond accident and chance, circumstance and misunderstanding. It's about more than the sexual drives of adolescents, too, though that might be hard to believe in a country where sex alone is enough of an argument to make anyone do just about anything.
In Baltimore, a city with the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation, the epidemic is, at root, about human expectation, or more precisely, the absence of expectation. ~ David Simon

It doesn't dawn on this depraved bourgeois world that this is positively a sin against all reason; that it is criminal lunacy to keep on drilling a born half-ape until people think they have made a lawyer out of him, while millions of members of the highest culture- race must remain in entirely unworthy positions; that it is a sin against the will of the Eternal Creator if His most gifted beings by the hundreds and hundreds of thousands are allowed to degenerate in the present proletarian morass, while Hottentots and Zulu Kaffirs are trained for intellectual professions. ~ Adolf Hitler

The greenhouse was made entirely of glass. Its ceiling reached five stories high, tall enough to fit a variety of fruit-bearing trees and vines. Butterflies flitted between sparkling flowers. Honeybees collected pollen for their hive, which conveniently drip honey right into glass jars. And watermelons, root beer melons, and orangeade melons grew along trellises. ~ Suzanne Selfors

Fusing the doctrines of Plotinus and Proclus with the creeds and beliefs of Christianity, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite combined the Neo-Platonic conviction of the fundamental oneness and luminous aliveness of the world with the Christian dogmas of the triune God, original sin and redemption. The universe is created, animated and unified by the perpetual self-realization of what Plotinus had called "the One," what the Bible had called "the Lord," and what he calls "the superessential Light. ~ Erwin Panofsky

If you think of movie studio executives, say, as society, then I root for the independent producers. ~ Donald E. Westlake

If many worlds would altogether try,
By all their sins the wrath of God to get,
This sin of yours surmounts them all as far
As doth the sun another little star. ~ Aemilia Lanyer

Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life's important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives. ~ Fred Rogers

Communism feeds on aggression, hatred, and the imprisonment of men's minds and souls. This shall not take root in the United States. ~ Emanuel Celler

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

"I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 ~ Sylvia Plath

At the top of the ramp, Holston saw the heaven into which he'd been condemned for his simple sin of hope. ~ Hugh Howey

One can be a good person and still believe that certain behaviors are a sin. I personally think lying is a sin, but some of my best friends are liars. ~ Tom King

To trust in you, Jesus - to boast in the gift of your righteousness, to rest in the constancy of your love, to wake up each day to your endless mercies, to hear you sing to us in the gospel - is to feel the stranglehold of shame lose its grip over our hearts. Jesus, I praise you for taking the guilt of our sin and the shame of our brokenness on the cross. You became sin for us that in you we might become the righteousness of God. Because of you, judgment day holds no terror. The cross was our judgment day. We no longer fear the gaze of God because of the grace of God we have in you. ~ Scotty Smith

You can be courageous in admitting your sin precisely because God is richly abundant in his mercy. He comes to you in mercy not because you are good but because you are a sinner, and he knows that because of this condition, you are unable to help yourself. ~ Paul David Tripp

To readers and museum visitors who are curious to know whether the pain I endured that day was
owing to the death of my father or to Füsun's absence, I would like to say that the pain of love is
indivisible. The pains of true love reside at the heart of our existence; they catch hold of our most
vulnerable point, rooting themselves deeper than the root of any other pain, and branching to every part
of our bodies and our lives.
...The anguish of love had disciplined me - brought me to maturity - but
in ruling my mind, it gave me scant latitude to use the reason that maturity had brought me. A man like
me, too long captive to a destructive passion, will continue on the course his reason tells him is wrong,
even if he knows it will bring him to sorrow; in time, he'll see only more and more clearly how wrong was
his path. In such situations there is an interesting phenomenon rarely remarked upon: Even on our worst
days, our reason does not stop speaking to us; even if unequal to the power of our passion, it continues
to whisper with merciless candor that our actions will serve no purpose but to heighten our love, and
therefore our pain. ~ Orhan Pamuk

To succeed, we have to be the party of change, we have to root out corruption in our own ranks and we have to be the party of solutions. ~ Bobby Jindal

Wraith shoved his hands in his jeans' pockets. "How long before we consider you overdue and mount a rescue party?"
"Never." Reaver shrugged into his shirt. "If I don't come back, it is because I'm either dead or in a situation that's too dangerous to get me out of."
"Oh," Sin said brightly-and sarcastically. "You mean like the situation Harvester is in."
Seminus demons were annoying no matter what gender. "Yes. Like that."
She punched him lightly in the shoulder. "Good. Glad we're clear. Try to come back soon or we'll come after you. ~ Larissa Ione

The confessor can nullify the exquisitely seasonable moment of confession by talking instead of listening. When he sees pedagogy and advice as more important than simple listening, he diverts the stream of confession. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Golden Verses So-called because they are "good as gold." They are by some attributed to Epicarmos, and by others to Empedocles, but always go under the name of Pythagoras, and seem quite in accordance with the excellent precepts of that philosopher. They are as follows: Ne'er suffer sleep thine eyes to close Before thy mind hath run O'er every act, and thought, and word, From dawn to set of sun; For wrong take shame, but grateful feel If just thy course hath been; Such effort day by day renewed Will ward thy soul from sin. E. C. B. ~ Pythagoras

Sin has gotten men into more trouble than science can get him out of. ~ Vance Havner

Sooner or later we must leave our dream world and face up to the facts of God, sin, and judgment. The Bible says, "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" [Romans 3:23 NIV]. ~ Billy Graham

If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man. ~ John Graves

The prophet shows that, for the sake of silence, we are to abstain even from good talk. If this be so, how much more needful is it that we refrain from evil words, on account of the penalty of the sin! ~ Benedict Of Nursia

The Last Leaf

I saw him once before,
As he passed by the door,
And again
The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,
Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,
Not a better man was found
By the Crier on his round
Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And looks at all he meets
Sad and wan,
And he shakes his feeble head,
That it seems as if he said,
"They are gone."

The mossy marbles rest
On the lips that he has prest
In their bloom,
And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

My grandmamma has said
Poor old lady, she is dead
Long ago
That he had a Roman nose,
And his cheek was like a rose
In the snow;

But now his nose is thin,
And it rests upon his chin
Like a staff,
And a crook is in his back,
And a melancholy crack
In his laugh.

I know it is a sin
For me to sit and grin
At him here;
But the old three-cornered hat,
And the breeches, and all that,
Are so queer!

And if I should live to be
The last leaf upon the tree
In the spring,
Let them smile, as I do now,
At the old forsaken bough
Where I cling. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Thunderously, inarguably, the Sermon on the Mount proves that before God we all stand on level ground: murderers and temper-throwers, adulterers and lusters, thieves and coveters. We are all desperate, and that is in fact the only state appropriate to a human being who wants to know God. Having fallen from the absolute Ideal, we have nowhere to land but in the safety net of absolute grace. ~ Philip Yancey

The root of a nation's misfortunes has to be sought in the moral failings of the government. ~ Aung San Suu Kyi

I wanted to pray for an hour, but I keep thinking and thinking, and always sick thoughts, and my head aches - what is the use of praying? - it's only a sin! It is strange, too, that I am not sleepy: in great, too great sorrow, after the first outbursts one is always sleepy. Men condemned to death, they say, sleep very soundly on the last night. And so it must be, it si the law of nature, otherwise their strength would not hold out ... I lay down on the sofa but I did not sleep ... ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

It is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing. ~ Jose Marti

This country," said Eliot, "had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors. They were supported by individual contributions given to mothers who marched on Sundays from door to door. The ideal of the research was to find a specific chemical deodorant for every odor. But then the hero, who was also the country's dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn't a scientist, and they didn't need the projects any more. He went right to the root of the problem."
"Uh huh," said the Senator. He couldn't stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarassed by his son. "He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?"
"No. As I say, the hero was dictator, and he simply eliminated noses. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

It's specifically this Z = 2^(Aleph0) that he couldn't prove. Ever. Despite years of unimaginable doodling. Whether it's what unhinged him or not is an unanswerable question, but it is true that his inability to prove the C.H. caused Cantor pain for the rest of his life; he considered it his great failure. This too, in hindsight, is sad, because professional mathematicians now know exactly why G. Cantor could neither prove nor disprove the C.H. The reasons are deep and important and go corrosively to the root of axiomatic set theory's formal Consistency, in rather the same way that K. Godel's Incompleteness proofs deracinate all math as a formal system. Once again, the issues here can be only sketched or synopsized (although this time Godel is directly involved, so the whole thing is probably fleshed out in the Great Discoveries Series' Godel booklet). ~ David Foster Wallace

Oh, hour of forgiven sin, moment of perfect pardon, our soul shall never forget you while, within you, life and being find immortality! ~ Charles Spurgeon

The more seriously we understand the radical nature of sin, the more it exercises a restraint upon us. ~ R.C. Sproul

Sin and Satan deceive our hearts with lies that God is distant. His hand of discipline declares he is never nearer. ~ Bryan Chapell

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which "God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men. ~ Thomas Merton

You're right, pup. So I'll be sending you over to the Ishtar for sin to babysit until I get back. That'll make sure nothing bad happens to you." 'Now, that was a nice shade of indignation mottling the boy's skin. Quite impressive, really. If he were a tea kettle, he'd be whistling like a train.' – Sundown ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Water is the formless potential out of which creation emerged. It is the ocean of unconsciousness enveloping the islands of consciousness. Water bathes us at birth and again at death, and in between it washes away sin. It is by turns the elixir of life or the renewing rain or the devastating flood. ~ Scott Sanders

Sin is an exacting despot who can be vanquished by no created power, but by the sovereign power of Jesus Christ alone. ~ Martin Luther

You can't root yourself
In the ground, hoping the world
Will grow around you.

You were made to do
More than hide in the shadows
Of another's leaves ~ Caroline Kaufman

O most glorious God ... Direct my thoughts, words and work, wash away my sins in the immaculate blood of the Lamb, and purge my heart by thy Holy Spirit ... Daily frame me more and more into the likeness of thy Son Jesus Christ ... Thou gavest thy Son to die for me, and hast given me assurance of salvation ... ~ George Washington

Most parents are so convinced of their little darling's innocence that, by proxy, in rallying for junior's purity they come to believe in their own innocence - as if duplicating oneself will make a right! ~ Anthony Marais