Condemnation Quotes (page 6)
There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of you contemporaries, and a source of terror to...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The sins that should have brought condemnation on us, God laid on Jesus. God’s love planned an amazing exchange: Jesus endured what we deserved so that we might enjoy what he deserved—eternal life. And the way we come to enjoy this
life is by believing in Jesus. That’s what he said: 'Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life' (John 6:47; cf. Luke 8:12).
John Piper
There are freaky talking mannequins in the Salem Witch Museum that recite the Lord's Prayer and while they do resemble shrunken apples they nevertheless help the visitor understand how hard it must have been for the condemned to say the line about forgiving those who trespass against us.
Sarah Vowell
...we never cease hoping--and thus did our Judge condemn us to suffer in saecula.'
Ferrante asked: 'But what is it that you hope for?'
You might as well ask what you will hope for yourself. ...You will hope that a wisp of wind, the slightest swell of the tide, the arrival of a single hungry leech, can return us, atom by atom, to the great Void of the Universe, where we would somehow again participate in the cycle of life.
Umberto Eco
A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves...
Henry David Thoreau
The principle tragedy of my life is, like all tragedies, an irony of Destiny. I reject real life as if it were a condemnation; I reject dreams as if they were an ignoble liberation. […]
After the end of the stars uselessly whitened in the morning sky and the breeze became less cold in the barely orange tinged in the yellow of the light on the scattered low clouds, I, who hadn’t slept, could finally, slowly raise my body, exhausted from nothing from the bed from which I had thought the...
Fernando Pessoa
Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Elinor now found the difference between the expectation of an unpleasant event, however certain the mind may be told to consider it, and certainty itself. She now found that, in spite of herself, she had always admitted a hope, while Edward remained single, that something would occur to prevent his marrying Lucy; that some resolution of his own, some mediation of friends, or some more eligible opportunity of establishment for the lady, would arise to assist the happiness of all. But he was...
Jane Austen
Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank may be turned to-morrow; there is not any literary reputation, not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be revised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of his heart, the religion of nations, the manner and morals of...
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Wheels have been set in motion, and they have their own pace, to which we are...condemned. Each move is dictated by the previous one - that is the meaning of order. If we start being arbitrary it'll just be a shambles: at least, let us hope so. Because if we happened, just happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know that we were lost. A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty - and, by which definition, a philosopher - dreamed he was a butterfly, and...
Tom Stoppard
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and...
George Santayana