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Sin   /sɪn/   Listen
Sin

verb
(past & past part. sinned; pres. part. sinning)
1.
Commit a sin; violate a law of God or a moral law.  Synonyms: transgress, trespass.
2.
Commit a faux pas or a fault or make a serious mistake.  Synonyms: blunder, boob, drop the ball, goof.



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"Sin" Quotes from Famous Books



... toil not," saith Jesus, "but come unto Me;" There's rest for the weary, rest even for thee— I have toiled, and have suffered, and died for thy sin; Then only believe, and the crown thou shalt win, The crown of Eternal Life, fadeless and bright, Prepared for all nations who walk in ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney

... had so lately nestled in her bosom and smiled in her face; and then she raised her eyes and countenance toward heaven, as if calling on God to curse the perpetrator of the foul deed. She was spared the sin of such a prayer for, maddened at his disappointment, and excited at the sight of blood, the Huron mercifully drove his tomahawk into her own brain. The mother sank under the blow, and fell, grasping at her child, ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper

... Lincoln's character will find this inaugural address instinct with another meaning, which, very naturally, the President's own comment did not touch. The eternal law of compensation, which it declares and applies to the sin and fall of American slavery, in a diction rivaling the fire and dignity of the old Hebrew prophecies, may, without violent inference, be interpreted to foreshadow an intention to renew at a fitting moment the brotherly goodwill ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay

... hauf an hour—nay, happen a quarter of an hour sin', just afore I set off. He said he aimed to come here, and I sudn't wonder but ye'll have old Helstone too. I seed 'em saddling his little nag as I passed ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... understand. The standard of the Theosophist as to right and wrong is always higher than that of the less instructed man, yet he is far gentler than the latter in his feeling towards the sinner, because he comprehends more of human nature. He realizes how the sin appeared to the sinner at the moment of its commission, and so he makes more allowances than is ever made by the man who is ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater

... Man I leave out, acknowledging a grave omission, the doctrine of the Fall and of Sin. And I do so because these have not yet, as I believe, been adequately treated: here the fruitful reaction to the stimulus of evolution is yet to come. The doctrine of sin, indeed, falls principally within the scope of that discussion which has followed or displaced the Darwinian; ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel

... dress—it was a well-made compliment paid to Death. Her innocent white muslin apron was a little domestic poem in itself. Her jet earrings were so modest in their pretensions that a Quaker might have looked at them and committed no sin. The comely plumpness of her face was matched by the comely plumpness of her figure; it glided smoothly over the ground; it flowed in sedate undulations when she walked. There are not many men who could have observed Mrs. Lecount ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... in us a prudent regret; to behold a person ONLY amiable to the sight, warms us with a religious indignation; but to turn our eyes to a Countess of Salisbury, gives us pleasure and improvement; it works a sort of miracle, occasions the bias of our nature to fall off from sin, and makes our very senses and affections converts to our religion, and promoters of our duty." His flattery was as ready for the other sex as for ours, and was at ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson

... cynic and the worldly wise, and also the experiences of life, teach "never trust, always be cautious, never confide in letter or speech," curb the trusting urge in our nature. The betrayal of trust is the one sin; all other crimes from murder down may find an excuse in passion or weakness, but when the trusting are deceived or injured, the cement substance of our social structure is dissolved and the fabric of our lives threatened. To trust is to hand over one's destiny to another ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... he wove on his wondrous loom, the fabrics of sound and beauty, the wonderful scroll of tone, and say that this mighty genius remains in a class alone. I whistle "The Pilgrims' Chorus," and chortle of "Lohengrin," and say that all other music is merely a venial sin. But when at my own piano Susannah sits down to play, I beg her to cut out Wagner and shoo all his noise away. "I'm weary and worn and beaten; my spirits," I say, "are low; so give us some helpful music—a ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason

... a different character: "The very air breathes sin to-day," he cried; "oh that I did not find the taint of the city in these works of God! Alas! sweet Nature, the child of the Almighty, is made to do the fiend's work, and does it better than the town. O ye beautiful trees and fair flowers, ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... with your eyes of jet, Your midnight hair and your piquant chin, Your lips whose odours of violet Drive men to madness and saints to sin,— I see you over the footlights' glare Down in the pit 'mid the common mob,— Your throat is burning, and brown, and bare, You lean, and listen, and pulse, and throb; The viols are dreaming between us two, And my gilded crown is no make-believe, I am more than an actor, dear, to you, For you ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson

... youngest brigand, "how she loves me. And when I told her that I was going upon the road to earn the moneys necessary for our happiness, she said that she would climb down from her window at night and come with me. But," he concluded unctuously, "I pointed out to her that from sin ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... Wordsworths and Quillinans sat two hours with us. He said he thought [Dr. Arnold] was mistaken in the philosophy of his view of the danger of Milton's Satan being represented without horns and hoofs; that Milton's conception was as true as it was grand; that making sin ugly was a common-place notion compared with making it beautiful outwardly, and inwardly a hell. It assumed every form of ambition and worldliness, the form in which ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... pigs. Sensible little piggywiggys. I've got a Committee full of that sort of thing. We live like little modest pigs. And let the world go hang. And pride ourselves upon our freedom from the sin of presumption. ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... it were a sin and a shame to cut her pretty curls, that become her so well," said Louis. "But we have no scissors, ma belle, so you need fear no ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... Romans is furnished by the early history of monasticism in the Roman world. When the Oriental Christian had convinced himself of the vanity of the world, he said: "It is the weakness of the flesh and the enticements of the wicked which tempt me to sin. Therefore I will withdraw from the world and mortify the flesh." This is the spirit which drove him into the desert or the mountains, to live in a cave with a lion or a wolf for his sole companion. This is the spirit which took St. Anthony ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott

... late, because this immense joy, this finding one's ideal, is poisoned by remorse and shame. Their criminal happiness can remain undisturbed because it is criminal; it has the conditions of life, frailty and misery; it bears the impress of sin, therefore it belongs to a common humanity.... But find ideal bliss in a legitimate union, find it in time to welcome it without shame and cherish it without remorse; be happy as a lover and honored as a wife; to experience the wild ardor of love and preserve the charming freshness of ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... in rebellion she asked, Why not? What harm, what evil? Was it absolutely necessary that she should let all pleasure pass, thrust it aside? The suffering she had known, would not that be sufficient penance for this little sin? But on his side, was this being fair to him? This man loved her, and she knew it. Up to this time he had met her but twice, and yet he loved her, incredible as it seemed. And though he never spoke of this love with his lips, ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... mind. Murray, although there were some good points about him, was not considered trustworthy. In his cups he was quarrelsome and as choleric as a Welshman; and a fondness for liquor was his besetting sin. He was an excellent accountant and an efficient clerk, but could hardly be relied on when a clear head and cool judgment ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... not tell the Priest our plight, Or he would call it a sin; But—we have been out in the woods all night, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling

... congregated many avowed infidels, Romanists, and drunkards,—living together, and associated for evil, but apparently without any effective counteracting influence. In many of its closes and courts sin and vice walked about openly—naked ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton

... Trevor of Norsham. Redeemed, Compton of Battle. Faint not, Hewit of Heathfield. Make Peace, Heaton of Hare. God Reward, Smart of Fivehurst. Standfast on High, Stringer of Crowhurst. Earth, Adams of Warbleton. Called, Lower of the same. Kill Sin, Pimple of Witham. Return, Spelman of Watling. Be Faithful, Joiner of Britling. Fly Debate, Roberts of the same. Fight the good Fight of Faith, White of Emer. More Fruit, Fowler of East Hadley. Hope for, Bending of the same. Graceful, Harding of Lewes. Weep not, Billing of the same. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume

... still as black in the eyes of God and man as before. I saw that soon; saw it always; see it to-day; and pray God in his infinite mercy to blot out that crime from his book—to pardon the poor weak creature who was driven to madness, and attempted to commit that deadly sin. ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke

... persons who, without being chargeable with the vice here spoken of, yet 'stand accountant for as great a sin'; though not dull and monotonous, they are vivacious mannerists in their conversation, and excessive egotists. Though they run over a thousand subjects in mere gaiety of heart, their delight still flows from one idea, namely, themselves. ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... his mind that his descriptions would die where they first saw the light, and that therefore he had indulged himself in a freedom of detail and topic only customary in posthumous memoirs. He expresses his astonishment that this particular sin should have been visited upon him at a distance of three thousand miles, when the Quarterly reviewer's own fame rested on the more aggravated instance of a book of personalities published under the very noses of the persons described (Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk). After ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... subordinate and collateral proceedings, as well as in the great and essential ones, they had the blind and obstinate folly to make this appointment. It is not contempt of public opinion in the Duke, but it is that ignorance or indifference, or disregard of it, which has been the besetting sin of his political life, and has so largely affected his political sayings and doings. Peel ought to have known better, and have taken a more correct view of his position, and the effect such an appointment would have on it. It is difficult to say what consequences may flow from this affair. The ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville

... counsel, and recommended vigorous resolution against any deviation from moral duty. BOSWELL. 'But you would not have me to bind myself by a solemn obligation?' JOHNSON. (much agitated,) 'What! a vow—O, no, Sir, a vow is a horrible thing, it is a snare for sin. The man who cannot go to Heaven without a vow—may go—' Here, standing erect, in the middle of his library, and rolling grand, his pause was truly a curious compound of the solemn and the ludicrous; he half-whistled in his usual way, when pleasant, and he paused, ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell

... virtue and intelligence know that all the ills of life—scarcity of money, baldness, the comma bacillus, Home Rule, ... and the Potato Bug—are due to the Sherman Bill. If it is repealed, sin and death will vanish from the world, ... the skies will fall, and ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley

... Nowadays, when men write biographies, they throw what they call the veil of charity over the dark spots in a career. But when God writes a man's life he puts it all in. So it happened that there are found very few, even of the best men in the Bible, without their times of sin. But Dan'l came out spotless, and the preacher attributed his exceptionally bright life to the power of ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... Once more Satan had him at an advantage, for even then, had he gone to the captain, he would have been sent on shore, and retrieved his fault by returning home and relieving his mother's anxiety. Undo it he could not; for a sin, once committed, can never by man's power be undone, never forgiven. All sin is committed against God—the slightest evil thought, the slightest departure from truth, is sin against God's pure and holy law, and ...
— Archibald Hughson - An Arctic Story • W.H.G. Kingston

... His lightning, if I attempted that. No, then: the modern Adam is some eight to twenty thousand years wiser than the first—you see? less instinctive, more rational. The first disobeyed by commission: I shall disobey by omission: only his disobedience was a sin, mine is a heroism. I have not been a particularly ideal sort of beast so far, you know: but in me, Adam Jeffson—I swear it—the human race shall at last attain a true nobility, the nobility of self-extinction. I shall turn out ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... at all between them. That a mother should dislike her child offends our feelings and our conceptions of human sympathy; but that a mother should wantonly and without evidence accuse her son of a fearful crime, and be his only accuser, is a sin against humanity itself, and our reason revolts against it as ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... misfortunes and follies alike came the lively thrashing of grandpa Stebbins, and brought the boy to a realizing sense of the situation. The young sinner found himself suddenly confronted with the penalty of his sin, and when he found that this penalty was really extreme suffering, he made up his mind that it was something worth ...
— The Evolution of Dodd • William Hawley Smith

... spot thus brought in contact with human lips is carefully wiped with an embroidered napkin dipped in a golden basin of water; the water used in this ceremony is then supposed to be of priceless value as a purifier of sin, and is carefully preserved, and, corked up in tiny phials, is distributed among the sultanas, grand dignitaries, and prominent people of the realm, who in return make valuable presents to the lucky messengers and Mussulman ecclesiastics ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... created living things. A milder form of the heresy asserted that Christ's body was corruptible but was not corrupted. Aphthartodocetism springs from a spurious spirituality, from a fastidiousness that has no place in true religion. It is symptomatic of Manicheanism, which associates matter with sin. Christians affirm sinlessness of Christ's humanity; they do not affirm immateriality of His body. The monophysites, in abandoning the true Christology, were predisposed to the infection of this heresy. A being in whom organic process was present seemed to these heretics ...
— Monophysitism Past and Present - A Study in Christology • A. A. Luce

... generation, the mothers of which are wrecks before its birth! Well for Florimonde and Maudita, with all the dew and freshness of their youth destroyed, if at length, thoroughly ennuyees, they do not put a piquancy and flavor of sin into their pleasure, as the old West Indian toper dashes his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... reason, then with right. Therein we do them no wrong. Yourselves will bear me witness however and always in this place, I have protested that death is no evil, save as the element of injustice may be mingled therein. The sting of death is sin. Death, righteously inflicted, I repeat, is the reverse ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... to obey. It will not be long, Oakes, that I shall remain under your orders," added the rear-admiral, with a painful smile. "There should be no charge of mutiny against me in the last act of my life. You ought to forgive the one sin of omission, when you remember how much and how completely my will has been subject to yours, during the last five-and-thirty years,—how little my mind has matured a professional thought ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper

... what nonsense!' said Farrell, vehemently. 'Of course she'll marry again. What is she?—twenty-one? It would be a sin and a shame.' ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... natural retributions, he will have a wholesome fear of putting his hand in the fire, since he knows the inevitable consequences. He understands that it is folly to expect that wrong can be done with impunity, and shrinks in terror from committing a sin whose consequences it is impossible that he should escape. He knows well that there are other punishments save those of the body, and he has felt the anguish which follows self-condemnation. "There is nothing degrading in such fear, but a heart-searching ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin

... I'm secure, Death hath no sting beside; The law gives sin its damning power, But ...
— Hymns and Spiritual Songs • Isaac Watts

... the poem is the spiritual world, of which we are members even while still denizens mu the world of time. In the spiritual world the results of sin or perverted love, and of virtue or right love, in this life of probation, are manifest. The life to come is but the fulfilment of the life that now is. This is the truth that Dante sought to enforce. The allegory in which he cloaked it is of a character ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... kneel to that enchanting, that adorable being! Oh unwise, benighted fool!—where were my thoughts? Next time I see her I will atone! .—no matter what creed she represents,—I will kiss the dust at her feet, and so make reparation for my sin!" ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... sin, iniquity, perniciousness, Belial, unrighteousness; disaster, misfortune, calamity, reverse; injustice, damage, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... eat his sin with his bread," exclaimed Rincon at that moment; "I should be sorry to become bail for the profit he will obtain from it. There will be a day of judgment at the last, when all things will have to pass, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... recognition of their rebellious colonies. And with the same cool persuasiveness, relieved by humorous smiles, he explained that the loyal Spaniards of the Ever Faithful Island thought there was no sin in doing harm to the English, even under the Mexican flag, whose legal existence ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... the other prisoners ostracized him or cursed him, he was painfully sensible of it, and even perplexed, and would try to win their favor. I perceived that he had always lived in a world of filth and sin, and knew no other. In that world, he had doubtless not done the best he might, but which of us can say he himself has done that? Had I been born and bred as he was, what would I be? What right had I to call him unfit for my companionship? I had no right to do it, nor had any other man. ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... felt example; and secondly, by gently and kindly instructing the minds of those amongst whom we labour as to its hurtful snares. We are accused by some of putting this subject before the blessed gospel. God forbid! But when we look on every reclaimed one and know that this was his besetting sin, we regard the giving it up as the rolling away of the stone before the Saviour's voice, 'Come forth,' can ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe

... he not love her? Redbud was so kind, so tender; her large liquid eyes were instinct with such deep truth and goodness; in her fresh, frank face there was such radiant joy, and purity, and love! Surely, a mortal sin to do otherwise than love her! And Verty congratulated himself on exemption from ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke

... heart was dumb Swelled, lowered, and shrank to feel its conqueror come. Yet high from heaven its empire vast and vain Frowned, and renounced not night's reluctant reign. The serpentine swift sounds and shapes wherein The stainless sea mocks earth and death and sin, Crawls dark as craft, or flashes keen as hate, Subdued and insubmissive, strong like fate And weak like man, bore wrathful witness yet That storms and sins are more than suns that set; That evil everlasting, girt for strife Eternal, wars with hope as death with life. The dark sharp ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... countenance of the poor foreign gentleman became cold as clay, and his heart withered within him; for as it had been her beauty and bearing which had led him to sin to obtain her, so, now that her beauty was in fuller bloom, and her manner more haughty by her success, did he feel her fascination to be almost more than he could bear. Nevertheless, having sworn his word, he undertook to obey ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy

... less degree than your friend or your master. But if you allow the idea of separateness from any evil thing or person to grow up within you, by so doing you create Karma, which will bind you to that thing or person till your soul recognises that it cannot be isolated. Remember that the sin and shame of the world are your sin and shame; for you are a part of it; your Karma is inextricably interwoven with the great Karma. And before you can attain knowledge you must have passed through all places, foul and clean alike. Therefore, remember ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins

... if it would save its soul alive, which, indeed, it will; only don't you think me a good fellow for not crying out, when I never had more to do than scratch myself and away went the fleas. But you all were real bricks; and if you were riled, why let him that is without sin cast the first stone, or let me cast it for him, and see if I don't ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... he had provided himself for any emergency, had looked long around him to choose a spot where the grass was especially high and thick, and had laid himself down to a sound sleep, murmuring as he did so, this sublime observation, "O laziness, but for the sin of Adam you would ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... Miscreants[FN77] went trampling heavy tread, * And she hath ta'en a vengeance dire on every Arab's head. A Kafir youth like fullest moon in darkness hands her round * Whose eyne are strongest cause of sin by him inspirited. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... perforated tin through which the penitent communicated her outpourings. It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin. When her confession was over the woman came and sat down on the same bench with me, where her broad-brimmed straw hat was lying. She seemed to be a country woman, with a simple, matronly face, which was solemnized and softened with the comfort that she had obtained ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... era and the medieval period, medicine and religion had had a close relationship. The New Testament had numerous references to the healing of the sick by spiritual means, and a casual relationship between sin and physical affliction had been assumed by many persons for centuries before the seventeenth. The hand of God was still seen by many in physical phenomena, whether disease or the flight of a comet. Not only was there a supernatural relationship seen between the ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes

... star pursues its course,—why, then, should it escape me, the mote? Oh, when the world turned from me, I sought to flee thither! I sighed for the rest there! Wretched, alone, I have wept in the dark and in the light that I might go and fling myself at the heavenly feet. But, do you see? sin has broken down the bridge between God and me. Yet why, then, is sin in the world,—that scum that rises in the creation and fermentation of good,—why, but as a bridge on which to re-seek those shores from which we wander? Man, I do repent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... you must and shall, if I can help you, ruffle it with the best. You will be better received if you do; for, though poverty is no sin, as the saying is, it is scouted as sin should be, while sins are winked at. You know that I require no money, and therefore you must and shall, if you love me, take ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... clouds the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving. Again; from the midst of the first judgment by fire, the command of the Deity to His servant is, "Escape to the mountain;" and the morbid fear of the hills, which fills any human mind after long stay in places of luxury and sin, is strangely marked in Lot's complaining reply, "I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me." The third mention, in way of ordinance, is a far more solemn one: "Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... now!" Jane, shuddering, her hand doth press: "Thy love I cannot all approve; We must not trust too much to happiness;— Go, pray to God, that thou mayst love him less!" "The more I pray, the more I love! It is no sin, for God is on my side!" It was enough; and Jane ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... letters; that he was sorry he had written them, but might on similar provocations recur to the same vengeance." On another occasion he said, "Lady B.'s first idea is what is due to herself. I wish she thought a little more of what is due to others. My besetting sin is a want of that self-respect which she has in excess. When I have broken out, on slight provocation, into one of my ungovernable fits of rage, her calmness piqued and seemed to reproach me; it gave her an air of superiority that ...
— Byron • John Nichol

... Eve the fruit had tasted, She to her husband hasted, And chuck'd him on the chin-a. Dear Bud, quoth she, come taste this fruit; 'Twill finly with your palate suit, To eat it is no sin-a." ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... who can accept the retribution and feel no faintest impulse to blame and wound her lover—she can rise, must rise, to heights forbidden the lame wings of him who, in his anguish, can turn and strike the fellow-creature who has but partnered him in sin. Only Pippa, passing, could in that hour save Sebald; but by the tenderness which underlay her fierce and lustful passion, and which, in any later relation, some other need of the man must infallibly have called forth, Ottima would, I ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... argued to herself, but the truth was that she did not wish to go. Her dearest associations were in the churchyard yonder, the churchyard where she hoped ere long she would be laid. She hated life, she sought and craved for death. This was her sin. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... sentiment run out into sentimentalism, fluency, point, plenty of illustration, and knock-down argument. How could a poor boy, fresh from the groves of our Academy, where Good Taste reigned supreme, and where to learn how to manage one's voice was regarded as a sin against sincerity, how could he meet such demands ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... it will be as you say—but credulity is not my besetting sin. I am ready to see the gentleman at any hour you and he ...
— At Last • Marion Harland

... your frankness, and with that queer morality of the Camp which, if it swallows a camel now and again, never strains at a gnat, how healthy and wholesome, and even pure, are your romances! You never gloat over sin, nor dabble with an ugly curiosity in the corruptions of sense. The passions in your tales are honourable and brave, the motives are clearly human. Honour, Love, Friendship make the threefold cord, the clue your knights and dames follow through how delightful a labyrinth of adventures! ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang

... easily be, at the assured devotion of England. In my opinion he can neither love Queen nor country that would not wish and further it should be so. And seeing her Majesty is thus far entered into the cause, and that these people comfort themselves in full hope of her favour, it were a sin and a shame it should not be handled accordingly, both for ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... would blind Or less would win man's mind. Through her we may see him 110 Made sweeter, not made dim, And her hand leaves his light Sifted to suit our sight. Be thou then, thou dear Mother, my atmosphere; My happier world, wherein To wend and meet no sin; Above me, round me lie Fronting my froward eye With sweet and scarless sky; 120 Stir in my ears, speak there Of God's love, O live air, Of patience, penance, prayer: World-mothering air, air wild, Wound with thee, in thee isled, Fold home, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... soon upon that dream of sin An awful light came bursting in; The shrine was cold at which she knelt; The idol of that shrine was gone; An humbled thing of shame and guilt; Outcast and spurned and lone, Wrapt in the shadows of that crime, With withered heart and burning brain, And tears that fell ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... this country its freedom gives a competition so vigorous that it must remain in direct popular sympathy. How strong it is, the country saw when its voice was lifted in the old cry, "Rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft." Its words started the slumbering, roused the careless, and called the "sacramental host," as well as the "men of the world, to arms." These three grand agencies are not rival, but supplementary, each doing an essential work in ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... know more about the state of the heathen than did the Apostle Paul, who wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, 'They that sin without law, perish without law,' nay, there are those who are not afraid to contradict the revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto Him to shew unto His servants, in which He solemnly affirms that 'idolators and all liars, their part shall be in ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison

... when told that Sir Thomas More was dead, casting his eyes upon the pretty fool that had glittered in his pageants, he said, "Thou art the cause of this man's death." The COWARD! to seek to turn upon a thing so weak as that, the heavy sin which ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... of Readers, who affect, forsooth, a certain Gentleman-like Familiarity of Tone, and mend the Language as they go on, crying instead of Pardoneth and Absolveth, Pardons and Absolves. These are often pretty Classical Scholars, and would think it an unpardonable Sin to read Virgil or Martial with so little Taste ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... far off each thing of sin and guilt, And in clear dream and solemn vision Telling of things which no gross ear can hear; Till oft converse with heavenly habitants Begins to cast a beam on the outer shape— The unpolluted temple of the mind, And turn it by degrees to the soul's essence, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 443 - Volume 17, New Series, June 26, 1852 • Various

... a life-long lesson, dear Eric;—the lesson that when a sin is committed we may have done with it, but it has by no means done with us. It is always so, Eric when we drink the wine it is red and sparkling, but we come afterwards to the ragged and ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar

... dia a el Barbarossa y como vio los soldados Espanoles desmandados dio en ellos con gran gritos. Y fue tan grande el miedo que vieron que Barbarossa los desbarato casi sin dano y con mucho facilidad mato tres mil hombres y cautivo quatro cientos dia de San Hieronymo ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey

... sin hath made equal, One in transgression and one in remorse. Bonds may be severed, but what were the sequel? Hardly shall amity come of divorce. Let the dead Past have a royal entombing, O'er it the Future built white for a fane! I that am haughty from much ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson

... a saint in heaven, whom you dare not touch, who hovers above you like a cloud, which floats away from you even as you gaze? To love is to feel one being in the world at one with us, our equal in sin as well as in virtue. To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us. Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... temptation. To see it was to be able to conquer it. He would humiliate himself; he would scourge himself; he would fast and pray; he would throw himself more unreservedly into the service of his Master. He had been too compromising with sin and sinners, and with his own weakness and sin, the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... power has lain in the ability to reproduce in fiction the circumstances of a compact community in a way that illustrates the various oppressions which such communities put upon individual vagaries, whether viewed as sin, or ignorance, or folly, or merely as social impossibility. She has, of course, studied other communities than New York: the priest-ridden Italy of the eighteenth century in The Valley of Decision; modern France in Madame de Treymes and The Reef; ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren

... it were, of crime, that guilt is still prolific; that the commission of the first ill deed, leads almost surely to the commission of a second, of a third, until the soul is filed and the heart utterly corrupted, and the wretch given wholly up to the dominion of foul sin, and plunged into ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert

... in that world of sin Heard evil things, to thee unknown, Apart from that defiling din Thy spirit ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard

... invitation to take a seat nigh the smoking kettle; "you have my hearty thanks; but I have eaten for the day, and am not one of them, who dig their graves with their teeth. Well; as you wish it, I will take a place, for it is long sin' I have seen people of my ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... one To father children, and to bear the name Of husband to me, that my sin may be ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... from her knees with an air of dignity, that struck even the Abate. 'Holy father,' said she, 'my heart abhors the crime you mention, and disclaims all union with it. Whatever are my offences, from the sin of hypocrisy I am at least free; and you will pardon me if I remind you, that my confidence has already been such, as fully justifies my claim to the protection I solicit. When I sheltered myself within these walls, it was ...
— A Sicilian Romance • Ann Radcliffe

... be honest, aw dooan't think this will suit yo, for aw'm blessed if aw think ther can be much life left i' this considerin what it's let aght sin ...
— Yorksher Puddin' - A Collection of the Most Popular Dialect Stories from the - Pen of John Hartley • John Hartley

... negligently lost, or from rebinding, it properly implies a certain relation to God. For it is He to Whom we ought to be especially bound as our indefectible principle; to Him must we assiduously direct our choice as our ultimate end; He it is Whom we negligently lose by sin and Whom we must regain by believing in Him and by ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas

... every corner of it. I want it swept clear of shadows. You need have no fear. If you were a murderess, or if every day of it was black with sin, my love could ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim

... will find that these facts, when taken in connection with the others, only supply us with a standard in the nature of this Being himself by which most of his acts are exhibited to us as those of a criminal madman. If he had been blind, he had not sin; but if we maintain that he can see, then his sin remains. Habitually a bungler as he is, and callous when not actively cruel, we are forced to regard him, when he seems to exhibit benevolence, as not divinely benevolent, but merely weak ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... with Angelo for her brother's life, her horror of her brother's sin is so intense, and her perception of the justice of Angelo's reasons for refusing her is so clear and keen, that she is ready to abandon her appeal before it is well begun; she would actually do so ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... committee, for the purpose of cajoling and intimidating the freeholders. The people were solemnly warned from thousands of pulpits not to vote for any Whig candidate, as they should answer it to Him who had ordained the powers that be, and who had pronounced rebellion a sin not less deadly than witchcraft. All these advantages the predominant party not only used to the utmost, but abused in so shameless a manner that grave and reflecting men, who had been true to the monarchy in peril, and who bore ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... sat pale with indignation and did not know at first how to express her anger. Then she made a sign to Tinette and Sebastian to withdraw, and turning to Heidi, who was standing by Clara's couch, quite unable to understand of what sin she had been guilty, began in a ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri

... "Wolfville" days—the best of all. It pictures the fine comradeship, broad understanding and simple loyalty of Faro Nell to her friends. Here we meet again Old Monte, Dave Tutt, Cynthiana, Pet-Named Original Sin, Dead Shot Baker, Doc Peets, Old Man Enright, Dan Boggs, Texas and Black Jack, the rough-actioned, good-hearted men and women who helped to make this author famous as a teller of ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis

... Jesus as told in the Gospels furnishes no ground for any confusion on the subject of his human life. It represents him as subject to all ordinary human conditions excepting sin. He began life as every infant begins, in feebleness and ignorance; and there is no hint of any precocious development. He learned as every child must learn. The lessons were not gotten easily or without diligent study. He played as other boys did, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller

... swept over her a new feeling, one she had never felt before. Up to this point a determination to justify her child, to reverse the verdict of the world, to turn her husband's sin upon himself, had made her defiant, even bitter; in all things eager to live up to her new life, to the standard that Richard had by manner and suggestion, rather than by words, laid down for her. But now there came in upon her a flood of despair. At best she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... to their higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject by committing some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition of ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.

... and I went to church that day: it was so cold. My father preached from the text, "Be sure your sin shall find you out". I thought with myself that he had found out my sin, and was preparing to punish me for it, and I was filled with terror as well as dismay. I could scarcely keep my seat, so wretched was I. But when after many instances in which punishment had come upon evil-doers when ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald

... un homme avot deux garchens. L'pus jeune dit a sin pere-mon pere donez me ch que j'dor recouvre d'vo bien; et l'pere leu-z-a done a chacun ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam

... demand for political equality, so long as by scriptural teachings they perpetuate our racial and religious subordination." Mrs. Stanton would demand that an expurgated Bible be read in churches. "Such parables as refer to woman as 'the author of sin,' 'an inferior,' 'a subject,' 'a weaker vessel,'" she says, "should be relegated to the ancient mythologies as mere allegories, having no application whatever to the womanhood of this generation. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... at least as to want of activity in the field of Latin authorship. There was a flood of books and pamphlets of all sorts, and above all of poems, in Rome. Poets swarmed there, as they did only in Tarsus or Alexandria; poetical publications had become the standing juvenile sin of livelier natures, and even then the writer was reckoned fortunate whose youthful poems compassionate oblivion withdrew from criticism. Any one who understood the art, wrote without difficulty at a sitting his five hundred hexameters in which no schoolmaster found anything ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... penitent, Ben! Poor lad, he died Young. Let me see now, Master Bame, you say Rob Greene wrote this on earth before he died, And then you printed it yourself in hell!" "Stay, sir, I came not to this haunt of sin To make mirth for Beelzebub!" "O, Ben, That's you!" "'Swounds, sir, am I Beelzebub? Ogs-gogs!" roared Ben, his hand upon his hilt! "Nay, sir, I signified the god of flies! I spake out of the scriptures!" snuffled Bame With deprecating ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... especially, because it is a perfect illustration of the way traveled by the positive school of criminology. The insane were likewise considered to blame for their insanity. At the dawn of the 19th century, the physician Hernroth still wrote that insanity was a moral sin of the insane, because "no one becomes insane, unless he forsakes the straight path of virtue and of the fear of ...
— The Positive School of Criminology - Three Lectures Given at the University of Naples, Italy on April 22, 23 and 24, 1901 • Enrico Ferri

... of God, see how he usually expresses himself: "I entreat you, O Timothy, by the love which you bear me. I conjure you, by the bowels of Jesus Christ. I beseech you, by the meekness of Christ. If you love me, do this." And see how he directs us to reprove those who sin: "If any one should fall, do you who are spiritual remind him in that spirit of meekness, remembering that you may also fall," and into a more grievous crime. St. Peter, who had received the keys of the kingdom of ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler

... muttered at last, "you know little about such matters. I tell you again that it was the Devil my eyes saw. Twice have I looked upon him, and each time, in response to prayer, has the good Lord delivered His servant from the bondage of sin, the snares of the fowler. Not by carnal weapons of the flesh are we bidden to overcome, but by spiritual wrestling; even as did he of old wrestle with the angel, are we to master ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... him in the busy mart; His eyes are large, his lips are firm, And on his temples, care or sin Has left its claw prints hardened in; His step is nervous and infirm; I wondered if he ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... God's will not for righteousness as mine, If right be righteous, wrong be wrong, must be. How else may God work wrong's requital? I Must be or none may be his minister. And yet what righteousness is his to cast Athwart my way toward right this wrong to me, A sin against the soul and honour? Why Must this vile word of YET cross all my thought Always, a drifting doom or doubt that still Strikes up and floats against my purpose? God, Help me to know it! This weapon chosen of me, This ...
— Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... been described in the idiom, such as atoned for its solecism: for Milton recurs to the same idiom, and under the same entire freedom of choice, elsewhere; particularly in this instance, which has not been pointed out: 'And never,' says Satan to the abhorred phantoms of Sin and ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey

... (the book had been an indiscretion, long since bitterly repented of), should be singled out for these humiliating exercises. There were other nuns of her acquaintance, proud, haughty and overbearing (her foot slipped here as a reminder against the sin of hasty judgments, and she felt that it was a small and niggling Justice that counted offences at such a crisis), and—and thinking too much of their holiness, to whom this mortification, with all the rust flakes in bosom and kerchief, would ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the judgment is past. In Christ, the burning bush, the fire of the Divine Holiness did its double work: in Him sin was condemned in the flesh; in Him we are free. In giving up His will to the death, and doing God's will, Christ sanctified Himself; and in that will we are sanctified too. His crucifixion, with its judgment of the flesh, His death, with its entire putting off of what is of nature, is not only for ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray

... spell. The whiskey—if he could only reach the whiskey. Then he remembered he was receiving a Sacrament, and struggled to get on with it. Tell him, old man, tell him of your various rottennesses and vile transgressions, if you can remember some. A sin is whatever you're sorry for, maybe. But Old Donegal, you're sorry for the wrong things, and this young jesuitical gadget wouldn't like listening to it. I'm sorry I didn't get it instead of Oley, and I'm sorry I fought in the war, and I'm sorry I can't get out of this ...
— Death of a Spaceman • Walter M. Miller

... mortality clutches the highest and purest of earthly mould, degrading them into kindred with the lowest, and even with the very brutes, like whom their visible frames return to dust. In this manner, selecting it as the symbol of his wife's liability to sin, sorrow, decay, and death, Aylmer's sombre imagination was not long in rendering the birthmark a frightful object, causing him more trouble and horror than ever Georgiana's beauty, whether of soul or ...
— Short-Stories • Various

... doux and songs: not like other porters, for hire, but for the jests' sake. Now like a thin chairman, melted down to half his proportion, with carrying a poet upon tick, to visit some great fortune; and his fare to be paid him like the wages of sin, either at the day of marriage, ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve

... set themselves against the tyrant's lot; And I have never bowed me to his might, Nor knelt before him—for I bear within My heart the sternest consciousness of right, And that perpetual hate of gilded sin Which made me what I am; and though the stain Of poverty be on me, yet I win More honour by it, than the blinded train Who hug their willing servitude, and bow Unto the weakest and the most profane. Therefore, with unencumbered soul I go Before the footstool of ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun

... Egypto with its shepherds and gypsies, and the Pastor lobo, an allegorical satire on the church Lope afterwards entered—and in such purely secular, amorous, and on the whole less dramatic pieces as the Arcadia—not to be confused with his romance of the same name—and the Selva sin amor, a regular Italian pastoral in miniature, both of which were acted, besides many others intended primarly for reading, though they may possibly have been recited after the ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... true prelate. The case was as follows: There was an artilleryman in Manila, named Francisco de Nava, who had a female slave with whom he had illicit communication, as came to the ears of the archbishop. The archbishop ordered him to remove from himself this occasion [for sin] by selling the slave-girl to another person; and had the latter placed, for that purpose, in the house of a lady who was related to Dona Maria de Francia, who became fond of her and arranged to buy her from the artilleryman. The latter ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXV, 1635-36 • Various

... dreadfully woe-begone, and as if the tears were very near the surface, for punishment sat heavily upon these two light-hearted spirits, particularly as such severe measures did not seem necessary or just to them in view of the smallness of their sin. However, when the racket outside their door finally fell away into silence, Peace suddenly gave a little jump of inspiration, twisted her feet about the legs of her chair, and began a slow, laborious hitching process across the red rug toward the tiny dresser. Reaching this ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown

... palontologist might tell us if some such case of ischial approximation by natural mechanical causes has not caused the probable extinction of whole genera of vertebrates. "If we are to believe that for our original sin the pangs and labor of childbirth were increased, and if we also believe in the disproportionate contraction of the pelvic space being an efficient cause of the same difficulties of parturition, the logical inference ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various

... beneath His Hands unfolded, He moulded Man as free of mortal stain, And even now Earth's sin-struck sons and daughters His Living Waters ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... father, and fully satisfied all that decency required of him, it was now high time to appear again in the world, to converse with his friends, and maintain a character suitable to his birth and talents. "For," continued he, "though we should sin against the laws both of nature and society, and be thought insensible, if on the death of our fathers we neglected to pay them the duties which filial love imposes upon us; yet having performed these, and put it out of the power of ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... repeated the Doctor. 'We want Ethel to tell us that this very repentance and owning of the sin, is turning out well—better than going ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Was it possible that God could ever find the means of grace for such a man? It could be done, of course; it were a sin for her to doubt it. Yet she could not ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... However, he might improve himself at Edinburgh, where a' manner of genteel things were then to be got at an easy rate, and doubtless the young laird got a probationer at the College to write the epitaph; but I have often wondered sin' syne, how he came to make it in Latin, for assuredly his dead parent, if he could have seen it, could not have read a single word o't, notwithstanding it was so vaunty about his virtues, and other civil ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... Philosopher, sayes, Every thing hath two handles, as the fire brand, it may be taken up at one end in the bare hand without hurt: the other being laid hold on, will cleave to the very flesh, and the smart of it will pierce even to the heart. Sin hath the condition of the fiery end; the touch of it is wounding with griefe unto the soule: nay it is worse; one sin goes not alone but hath many consequences. Your Grace may find the truth of this in your perusal of this Author: your judgement shall ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli



Words linked to "Sin" :   evildoing, fall, unrighteousness, actual sin, boob, letter, like sin, Hebrew alphabet, original sin, alphabetic character, sinfulness, go against, Mesopotamia, colloquialism, infract, Hebraic alphabet, trigonometric function, transgress, Semitic deity, breach, letter of the alphabet, sine, transgression, circular function, drop the ball, break, violate, activity, venial sin, Hebrew script, mark of Cain, offend



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