Francis Schaeffer Quotes

An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.

God never meant that people were to wear clothes. He meant we were to be nude. But we were in a state of innocence. Then sin came into the human race and became a blood poisoning.

We are all afflicted by original sin; people succumbing to temptations to do and to be.

Each of us is born with a share of purity, predestined to be corrupted by our commerce with mankind, by that sin against solitude.

We all are originally sinners as Adam and in Adam, his leprosy cleaving faster to us than Naaman's did to Gahazai, so that even the infant, before it has seen the light of the world, has this blemish inherent in its unborn members.

Sins are timeless. Sins are an everyday reality for every one. Sin has been in existence since the beginning of man, since Adam and Eve. It will always be pertinent.

The story of the Fall always fascinates me as a play ground, but I cannot find any profound meaning in it, because of my 'liberal' view of human nature: I cannot believe in a state of original innocence, still less in a profound meaning in it, and I am always minimising the conception and the extent of Sin and the sinfulness of sex.

The fall of man is written in too legible characters not to be understood: Those that deny it, by their denying, prove it.

We ourselves, though we're guilty of every sin, are not just a work of God: we're image. Yet we have cut ourselves off from our Creator in both soul and body. Did we get eyes to serve lust, the tongue to speak evil, ears to hear evil, a throat for gluttony, a stomach to be gluttony's ally, hands to do violence, genitals for unchaste excesses, feet for an erring life? Was the soul put in the body to think up traps, fraud, and injustice? I don't think so.

As the salt flavors every drop in the Atlantic, so does sin affect every atom of our nature. It is so sadly there, so abundantly there, that if you cannot detect it, you are deceived.

...the fall of man in paradise has always been followed by his expulsion.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something (All The King's Men)

It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, "All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up." And they did.

Sin is the mother, and shame the daughter of lewdness.

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?

Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin-a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or not man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.

In Adam's fall We sinned all. In the new Adam's rise, We shall all reach the skies.

The fall of man stands a lie before Beethoven, a truth before Hitler.

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it.

We often wonder that certain men and women are left by God to the commission of sins that shock us. We wonder how, under the temptation of a single hour, they fall from the very heights of virtue and of honor into sin and shame. The fact is that there are no such falls as these, or there are next to none. These men and women are those who have dallied with temptation--have exposed themselves to the influence of it, and have been weakened and corrupted by it.

Sin is in, and so we begin.

We are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we are sinners.