Mortimer Adler Quotes

Sex is not sinful, but sin has perverted it.

The sin which is indulged to the greatest extent, which separates us from God and produces so many spiritual disorders, and which are contagious, is selfishness.

I have looked on a lot of women with lust. I've committed adultery in my heart many times. God recognizes I will do this and forgives me.

Our duty was to declare God's standards to the world: no adultery, no fornication, no gays, no idolatry.

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essential concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

Christians alone are in a position to rescue the perishing. We dare not settle down to try to live as if things were 'normal.' Nothing is normal while sin and lust and death roam the world, pouncing upon one and another till the whole population has been destroyed.

A Christian is not somebody who stays away from all the wicked things he loves and clings to all the righteous things he hates so that he can go to heaven. The fear of the Christian is not going to hell. The fear of the Christian is being separated from Christ.

Vanity, revenge, loneliness, boredom, all apply: lust is one of the least of the reasons for promiscuity.

People who have lust in their heart as just as guilty as those who commit adultery.

Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

I've committed adultery in my heart.

Love sinners, but hate their deeds, and do not disdain sinners for their failings, so that you yourself do not fall into the temptation in which they abide... Do not be angry at anyone and do not hate anyone, neither for their faith, nor for their shameful deeds... Do not foster hatred for the sinner, for we are all guilty... Hate his sins, and pray for him, so that you may be made like unto Christ, who had no dislike for sinners, but prayed for them.

The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust.

I have studiously tried to avoid ever using the word 'madness' to describe my condition. Now and again, the word slips out, but I hate it. 'Madness' is too glamorous a term to convey what happens to most people who are losing their minds. That word is too exciting, too literary, too interesting in its connotations, to convey the boredom, the slowness, the dreariness, the dampness of depression.

If certain women walk straight into adultery, there are many others who cling to numerous hopes, and commit sin only after wandering through a maze of sorrows.

Even as I'm shoveling up my hooter, I realize the sad truth. Coke bores me, It bores us all. We're jaded cunts, in a scene we hate, a city we hate, pretending that we're at the center of the universe, trashing ourselves with crap drugs to stave off the feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, aware that all we're doing is feeding that paranoia and disenchantment, yet somehow we're too apathetic to stop. Cause, sadly, there's nothing else of interest to stop for.

Sin is in itself separation from the good, but despair over sin is separation a second time.

Adulterers, in the first stages of the church, were excommunicated forever, and unqualified all their lives for bearing a part in Christian assemblies, notwithstanding they might seek it with tears, and all the appearances of the most unfeigned repentance.

Great thoughts of your sin alone will drive you to despair; but great thoughts of Christ will pilot you into the haven of peace.

I learned through my body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world.

My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.

Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.

Sometimes I think I am going mad. I live for days in the mystery and tears of things so that the commonest object, the most familiar face- even my own- become ghostly, unreal, enigmatic. I get into an attitude of almost total scepticism, nescience, solipsism, in a world of dumb, sphinx-like things that cannot explain themselves. The discovery of how I am situated- a sentient being on a globe in space overshadows me. I wish I were just nothing.

the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

I hate this fear. I hate this. I hate this world. I hate it that nobody needs me. I don’t own this world. I’ve had enough. It’s not supposed to be my fault. Only now.. Only now that I realized.. I hate this world now, living in this world where ‘promise’, ‘bond’ and ‘eternity’ don’t exist, and living in a world full fo strangers is a very, very scary thing. Scared that there’s no guarantee that I’ll be loved. You can’t be living with people surrounding you forever. You just cant. The world is too scary. - Akito