Johann Georg Zimmermann Quotes

I learned a lot about morality from fiction, from movies.

All preachers of morality, as also all theologians have a bad habit in common: all of them try to persuade man that he is very ill, and that a severe, final, radical cure is necessary.

By examining characters lighting the way to hell, as it were, are readers spared iniquity? Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

For some stories, it's easy. The moral of 'The Three Bears,' for instance, is "Never break into someone else's house.' The moral of 'Snow White' is 'Never eat apples.' The moral of World War I is 'Never assassinate Archduke Ferdinand.

Fiction can serve in a non-threatening way to open minds and, I hope, hearts to the Word of God.

Fiction is the great repository of the moral sense. The wicked get punished.

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin.

A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

There is a danger when we give young people only a catalog of dos and don'ts. In these young minds, the gospel is not intellectually credible.

I mean, in a way, I feel that one of the reasons for learning about Darwinian evolution is as an object lesson in how not to set up our values and social lives.

It must be said that charity can, in no way, exist along with mortal sin.

Murdering someone would surely prove that you are capable of killing, but it wouldn't be the most reasonable way to understand why you shouldn't do it.

Those who taught you were wrong. I have never set down a "right" or "wrong," a "do" or a "don't." To do so would be to strip you completely of your greatest gift - the opportunity to do as you please.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.

Obey something, and you will have a chance to learn what is best to obey. But if you begin by obeying nothing, you will end by obeying the devil and all his invited friends.

In the fairy tale, an incomprehensible happiness rests upon an incomprehensible condition. A box is opened and all evils fly out. A word is forgotten and cities perish. A lamp is lit and love flies away. An apple is eaten and the hope of God is gone.

[..] and there are tons of people I hate so much that I wouldn't mind taking them out. But killing them wouldn't get me anywhere - that's the conclusion I always come to. If I'm going to pay for it in the end, I might as well let them live.

We are all born with the power of speech, but we need grammar. Conscience, too, needs Revelation.

I don;t think there's anything wrong with being a dreamer. There is not. But dreams have ways of turning into nightmares.

A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.

Somebody has been a complete ratbag all their life and they've gotten away with it, and they die happy and rich, we so much want to believe that they're going off to the halls of judgment, that their heart will be weighed against the feather of truth, that it will be heavy with sin and it will be eaten by a crocodile. It's almost essential to our well-being to have a fallback position like that. It may appear as if you've gotten away with it, but you'll pay for it later.

All errors are just ordinary, what extraordinary sin can you commit? All the sins have been committed already. You cannot find a new sin - it is very difficult, it is almost impossible to be original about sin. For millions of years people have committed everything that can be committed. To be thrown in hell for your sins. Now this is too much! you can throw a man into hell for five years, ten years, twenty years, fifty years. If a man has lived for seventy years you can throw him there for seventy years.and that is if you only believe in one life. It is good that they believe in one life.

Cowards only sin, brave men never, no, not even in mind.