25 Quotes About Original-Sin

The original sin is a theological concept that teaches that we all have inherited the fallen state of humanity from Adam and Eve. This includes not just sin, but also death and unhappiness. As such, we are all born as sinners who must constantly struggle to remain faithful to God and avoid the temptation of following our fallen nature. While this idea may seem grim, Jesus’ sacrifice on Calvary makes it possible for us to be forgiven and to live as children of God Read more

These quotes on original sin help Christians and non-Christians alike learn more about this important concept and how they can apply it to their lives.

By the way, if you get mad at your Mac...
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By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer's icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it. Peter Kreeft
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We do not have to be ashamed of what we are. As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds. These backgrounds may not be particularly enlightened or peaceful or intelligent. Nevertheless, we have soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it. Unknown
Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until...
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Belief is a wonderful way to pass the time until the facts come in. Carl R White
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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. Kilroy J. Oldster
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[I]t was with a good end in mind — that of acquiring the knowledge of good and evil — that Eve allowed herself to be carried away and eat the forbidden fruit. But Adam was not moved by this desire for knowledge, but simply by greed: he ate it because he heard Eve say it tasted good. Moderata Fonte
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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.) . Thomas Merton
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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. Criss Jami
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The doctrine of original sin is the doctrine according to which divine forgiveness makes known the accidental nature of human mortality, thus permitting an entirely new anthropological understanding. James Alison
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If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other. Robert Penn Warren
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When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, ThouSaw'st beyond death the resurrection of the dead C.s. Lewis
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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... Philip Pullman
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[M]an cannot be wicked without being evil, nor evil without being degraded, nor degraded without being punished, nor punished without being guilty. In short … there is nothing so intrinsically plausible as the theory of original sin. Joseph De Maistre
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The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I'm a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues. Malcolm Bradbury
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The true nature of man left to himself without restraint is not nobility but savagery. Steven James
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Original sin is a very commercial idea, ” said Duyckinck. “How do you think the Bible stays in print year after year? Mark Beauregard
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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. Erik Von KuehneltLeddihn
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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. Jeremy Pierre
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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. G.k. Chesterton
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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, ofhell. Andrew Murray
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I have found that this is pretty radical notion for anyone who was raised with a strong Christian background. Within that religious tradition there is an emphasis on original sin, which dictates that we area bacically not good at all but must work for our salvation. Within the Buddhist tradition we are saying the opposite: actually you are basically good. You are basically wise. You are basically kind. You just need to discover that truth and develop confidence in it. Lodro Rinzler
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If everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth.  . Gerald Hausman
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No man that ever lived, not John Calvin himself, ever asserted either original sin, or justification by faith, in more strong, more clear and express terms, than Arminius has done. John Wesley
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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. . Unknown
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Before eating from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had no notion of Good and evil. They were kicked out of paradise, because the supposed Creator was unable to reason that giving someone free will to choose between two things while having no notion of either, would be the Himalaya of nonsense. Haroutioun Bochnakian