We are punished by our sins, not for them.

Every year during their High Holy Days, the Jewish community reminds us all of our need for repentance and forgiveness.

Sometimes negative news does come out, but it is often exaggerated and manipulated to spread scandal. Journalists sometimes risk becoming ill from coprophilia and thus fomenting coprophagia: which is a sin that taints all men and women, that is, the tendency to focus on the negative rather than the positive aspects.

I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

Leaders are responsible not for running public opinion polls but for the consequences of their actions.

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

Although God loves us unconditionally, He does get angry at sin, wickedness and evil. But He is not an angry God. God hates sin, but He loves sinners! He will never approve of sin in your life, but He always loves you and wants to work with you to make progress in living a holy life in Christ.

Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

The excessive increase of anything causes a reaction in the opposite direction.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.

Bad men are full of repentance.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

How accurately can the law fix the crime? There has to be a mechanism for very fast action. The law is like this: catch them and punish them.

The next time someone tells you we can trim the budget by cutting aid, I hope you will ask whether it will come at the cost of more people dying.

It makes a great deal of difference whether one wills not to sin or has not the knowledge to sin.

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.

Smooth functioning of social life has always depended on the recognition of certain basic limits to behavior. We cannot simply say or do anything we wish, or offend people, without paying consequences – isolation, ostracism, etc.

If I hit a man, his head is gonna go into the bleachers.

When we believe the best of people, we let go of each thing they do that is hurtful to us. And we choose to think things like, ‚I don’t believe they meant to hurt me.‘ ‚Maybe they’re having a bad day or don’t feel well.‘ ‚They probably don’t even realize how they sound.‘

I was called a terrorist yesterday, but when I came out of jail, many people embraced me, including my enemies, and that is what I normally tell other people who say those who are struggling for liberation in their country are terrorists.

Forgiveness is not a feeling – it’s a decision we make because we want to do what’s right before God. It’s a quality decision that won’t be easy and it may take time to get through the process, depending on the severity of the offense.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

We are asking the nations of Europe between whom rivers of blood have flowed to forget the feuds of a thousand years.

Short cuts make long delays.

Naturally, everybody has certain things they wish they hadn’t done in life. They wish they hadn’t kicked their dog when they were ten or something.

Christ managed to boil down an awful lot of commandments to a few very simple rules for living. It’s when you go backwards through the ‚begats‘ and the Garden of Eden, and you start thinking, ‚Hang on, that’s a big punishment for eating one lousy apple… There’s a human-rights issue.‘

So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

‚You are no saint,‘ says the devil. Well, if I am not, I am a sinner, and Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners. Sink or swim, I go to Him; other hope, I have none.

The fact is, violence is not only not a beautiful thing, but it’s also very painful and not without consequences for the perpetrator as well as the victim.

It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.

I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it’s like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.

The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord’s mercy motivates us to do better.

First of all, you ask me if the God of Christians forgives one who doesn’t believe and doesn’t seek the faith. Premise that – and it’s the fundamental thing – the mercy of God has no limits if one turns to him with a sincere and contrite heart; the question for one who doesn’t believe in God lies in obeying one’s conscience.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.

An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.

Lord keep us all from sin. Teach us how to walk circumspectly; enable us to guard our minds against error of doctrine, our hearts against wrong feelings, and our lives against evil actions.

The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius.

People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.

I suppose that’s one of the ironies of life doing the wrong thing at the right moment.

The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.

There’s a deceptive sin that can keep us from walking in love: pride. It’s deceptive because when you have pride, you’re usually too proud to admit it. I know this because I used to have teachings on pride and they didn’t sell well.

When a man laughs at his troubles he loses a great many friends. They never forgive the loss of their prerogative.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

To be intimate with a married man, when my own father cheated on my mother, is not something I could forgive. I could not look at myself in the morning if I did that. I wouldn’t be attracted to a man who would cheat on his wife.

Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

Everybody will make mistakes, and for some that mistake will rise to the level of being a crime.

Fame is like a river, that beareth up things light and swollen, and drowns things weighty and solid.

You can live your life angry, bitter, mad at somebody or even guilty, not letting go of your own mistakes, but you won’t receive the good things God has in store.

I am no longer sure of anything. If I satiate my desires, I sin but I deliver myself from them; if I refuse to satisfy them, they infect the whole soul.

If Christ has died for me, ungodly as I am, without strength as I am, then I cannot live in sin any longer, but must arouse myself to love and serve Him who has redeemed me.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

His was a great sin who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours.

A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad consequences of his karma alone; and he goes alone to hell or the Supreme abode.

Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.