Seneca the Younger Quotes

That is the true definition of sin; when knowing right you do the lower, ah, then you sin. Where there is no knowledge, sin is not present.

There is no sin but ignorance.

The sins of teachers are the teachers of sin.

Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.

The only freedom I care about is the freedom to do right; the freedom to do wrong I am ready to part with on the cheapest terms to anyone who will take it of me.

Men have the power of thinking that they may avoid sin.

Every person who is tempted to go astray does not deserve punishment

Freedom is not the liberty do anything whatsoever. It is the freedom to do good

doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right

Our instinct has outrun our theory in this matter; for while we still insist upon free will and sin, we make allowance for individuals who have gone wrong, on the very ground of provocation, of temptation, of bad education, of infirm character.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

The man who does not know the nature of the Law, cannot know the nature of sin.

We tend to think that people are more to blame for their acts than for their omissions.

There's no question that as science, knowledge and technology advance, that we will attempt to do more significant things. And there's no question that we will always have to temper those things with ethics.

Each person is responsible only for his or her own sins. Even the Christian doctrine of 'original sin' does not mean that humans are punished for the sin of the first human pair but, rather, that humans seem inevitably to copy the sin of the first human pair.

That free will was demonstrated in the placing of temptation before man with the command not to eat of the fruit of the tree which would give him a knowledge of good and evil, with the disturbing moral conflict to which that awareness would give rise.

We are responsible for actions performed in response to circumstances for which we are not responsible.

I think God gives every one of us our own will, and unfortunately, some people choose to do evil things with it.

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.

The most ethical way to deal with an unethical situation would be to simply say: 'We did something wrong.' But nobody in a family like mine would ever respond like this.

To what extent is any given man morally responsible for any given act? We do not know.

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow.

Wisdom we know is the knowledge of good and evil, not the strength to choose between the two.

In some sort of crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.