Ambrose Bierce Quotes

In the Great Deluge in the days of Noah, nearly all mankind perished, eight persons alone being saved in the Ark. In our days a deluge, not of water but of sins, continually inundates the earth, and out of this deluge very few escape. Scarcely anyone is saved.

Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided; two thirds of the fair world it yet covers.

When Paul was exhorted to be baptized and to wash away his sins, there was an evident allusion to the use of water in the ordinance of baptism, and had there been no application of water on which to ground such an allusion, we may be certain that we should never have heard of washing away sins in baptism.

Let blood!. Let blood! I consider it as a meritorious action, that will wash away all my sins.

With soap, baptism is a good thing.

Those who devour interest will not stand except as stands one whom Satan has driven mad by his touch

A twice-born man who has intentionally drunk, through delusion of mind, the spirituous liquor called Sura shall drink that liquor boiling-hot; when his body has been completely scalded by that, he is freed from his guilt; Or he may drink cow's urine, water, milk, clarified butter or liquid cow dung boiling-hot, until he dies; When the Brahman [the highest caste] the Veda which dwells in his body is even once deluged with spirituous liquor, his Brahmanhood forsakes him and he becomes a Sudra [the lowest caste.]

Those who believed in us as the Madhi, and surrendered, have been delivered, and those who did not were destroyed …

The rising world of waters dark and deep.

Water, we go to you dirty and rise from you clean.

Were the life of man prolonged, he would become such a proficient in villainy, that it would become necessary again to drown or to burn the world. Earth would become an hell; for future rewards when put off to a great distance, would cease to encourage, and future punishments to alarm.

Forget them. Burn all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.

If you can sin and not weep over it, you are an heir of Hell. If you can go into sin, and afterwards feel satisfied to have done so, you are on the road to destruction. If there are no prickings of conscience, no inward torments, no bleeding wounds; if you have no throbs and heavings of a bosom that cannot rest; if your soul never feels filled with wormwood and gall when you know you have done evil, you are no child of God.

If there be a man before me who says that the wrath of God is too heavy a punishment for his little sin, I ask him, if the sin be little, why does he not give it up?

God planteth in mortal men the cause of sin whensoever he wills utterly to destroy a house.

The earthly form of Christ is the form that died on the cross. The image of God is the image of Christ crucified. It is to this image that the life of the disciples must be conformed; in other words, they must be conformed to his death (Phil 3.10, Rom 6.4) The Christian life is a life of crucifixion (Gal 2.19) In baptism the form of Christ's death is impressed upon his own. They are dead to the flesh and to sin, they are dead to the world, and the world is dead to them (Gal 6.14). Anybody living in the strength of Christ's baptism lives in the strength of Christ's death.

If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

As a forgiven son, I am justified, cleansed, washed clean. This is a greater reality than my sinful past.

Be assured that there is no sin you have ever committed that the blood of Jesus Christ cannot cleanse.

America is not big enough to shake her fist in the face of a holy God and get away with it, and as I read this I want to explain something. I'm going to read this and then I want to explain something. As America has permitted homosexuality to establish itself as an alternate lifestyle, it is also reeling from the frightening spread of sexually transmitted disease. Sin begets its own consequence, both on individuals and nations.

I have lived to see the greatest plague on earth -- the condemning of God's word, a fearful thing, surpassing all other plagues in the world; for thereupon most surely follow all manner of punishments, eternal and corporal.

Hell came right along with God, hand in hand. The stink of sulfur swirled in the air of the church, fire burned in the aisles, and brimstone rained out of the rafters. From the evangelist's oven mouth spewed images of a place with pitchforks, and devils, and lakes of fire that burned forever. God had fixed a place like that because he loved us so much.

Then the lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven; and He overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground. So it goes. Those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. The world was better off without them. And Lot's wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. But she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. So she was turned to a pillar of salt.