God is said to punish sin

• God is the creditor of that punishment which is due upon Sin; and He has the right of abating, as well as the right of exacting. Benjamin Whichcote
• God is the only being who is good, and the standards are set by Him. Because God hates sin, He has to punish those guilty of sin. Maybe that’s not an appealing standard. But to put it bluntly, when you get your own universe, you can make your own standards. Francis Chan
• Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner. George MacDonald
• The magnitude of the punishment matches the magnitude of the sin. Thomas Aquinas
• If there be a man before me who says that the wrath of God is too heavy a punishment for his little sin, I ask him, if the sin be little, why does he not give it up? Charles Spurgeon
• He who loveth God with all his heart feareth not death, nor punishment, nor judgment, nor hell, because perfect love giveth sure access to God. But he who still delighteth in sin, no marvel if he is afraid of death and judgment. Thomas a Kempis
• Sin and death and suffering and war and poverty are not natural—they are the devastating results of our rebellion against God. We long for a return to Paradise—a perfect world, without the corruption of sin, where God walks with us and talks with us in the cool of the day. Randy Alcor

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However, the truth is we are punished not for our sins, but by our sins

• Vices are their own punishment. Aesop
• We are punished by our sins, not for them. Elbert Hubbard
• Every sin brings its punishment with it. George Herbert
• Every sin provokes its punishment. Amos Bronson Alcott
• God does not punish us for our sins but by them. Ruth Graham
• Often, very often, we are punished as much by our sins as we are for them. Boyd K. Packer
• Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one’s own sins. Chanakya
• Sin contains its own judgement and punishment. Dalai Lama
• Sin is its own punishment, devouring you from the inside. WM. Paul Young
• Sin let loose speaks punishment at hand. William Cowper
• The payment for sins can be delayed. But they can’t be avoided. Shawn Ryan
• The sinner sins against himself; the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming the worse by his own action. Marcus Aurelius
• Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves. Albert Camus
• He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil. Emanuel Swedenborg

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Sin often has bitter consequences

• For consequences of past sin, effect doth ever follow cause; If we sow tares, we reap not grain, for such are Nature’s laws. Ardelia Cotton Barton
• All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions. Reinhold Niebuhr
• It is ever thus that the things which we do wrong – although they may seem little at the time, and though from the hardness of our hearts we pass them lightly by – come back to us with bitterness. Bram Stoker
• All sins cast long shadows. Proverb

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Sin can harm and weaken us

• It is the goodly outside that sin puts on which tempteth to destruction. It has been said that sin is like the bee, with honey in its mouth, but a sting in its tail. Hosea Ballou
• Sin is not hurtful because it is forbidden, but it is forbidden because it is hurtful. Benjamin Franklin
• Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one’s own sins. Chanakya
• Sin is disease, deformity, and weakness. Plato
• Sin defies God, utterly corrupts each individual, corrodes all social relationships, and issues in death. A. Carson
• Sin corrupts even our good deeds. We injure our shoulder trying to pat ourselves on the back. A. Carson
• Sin is a basilisk whose eyes are full of venom. If the eye of thy soul see her first, it reflects her own poison and kills her; if she see thy soul, unseen, or seen too late, with her poison, she kills thee: since therefore thou canst not escape thy sin, let not thy sin escape thy observation. Francis Quarles
• Sin always wounds the sinner. Caryll Houselander
• Sin in its ordinary progress first deceives, next hardens, and then destroys. John Thornton
• Some sins, like asps, always carry their sting with them. Henry Ward Beecher
• It’s sin and not poverty that makes men miserable. Scottish Proverb
• A sinner is an incendiary and sets the world on fire. Benjamin Whichcote
• All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. W. H. Auden
• Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off your relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over your mind; that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself. Susanna Wesley
• Sin is any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem’. Robert H. Schuller
• Sin traps us and puts us into a hole so deep we can’t get out of it alone. Try as we might, under sin’s tyranny we are crushed. The load accumulates, daily pulling us further down. It suffocates us. It strangles us. At some point, the backlog required to change becomes so demanding we don’t have the reserves to do what needs to be done. It’s like we’re carrying a load we can’t carry. We need help. We need Another to help us carry it.  Doug Hammack
• Sin felt like enslavement. Enslaved to their darker angels, dominated by their lesser natures. Doug Hammack
• Our lower nature is killing us. Sin is killing us. It’s a broad death that comes in many forms. Sin’s blindness kills our senses so we can’t see God move or sense the divine Presence. It is a soul death and a psychological one. Dreams that are born of divine destiny are killed off. Hope suffocates and dies. The same is true for virtue, wisdom, peace, and a close connection to the indwelling Spirit. Doug Hammack

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Sin lowers our level of consciousness

• The difficulty of inner work results from the great effort required to escape from the familiar gravity of lower attractor fields (levels of consciousness) and move to the influence of a higher field. In order to relieve this struggle, all religions issue restrictions against exposing oneself to the lower energy fields; it’s only from an authoritarian viewpoint that such error is depicted as “sin.” A more liberal viewpoint accepts man’s dalliance in lower energy fields as a pardonable “failing.” David R. Hawkins
• The worst effect of sin is within and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit. Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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Sin effects our connection to God and our access to spiritual power

• I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God. George Eliot
• You and your sins must separate, or you and your God will never come together. Charles Spurgeon
• If you allow one little sin to creep into your life, and think it doesn’t matter, it will grow and grow until it affects your whole spiritual life, deflecting you from your primary aim of serving God. Angus Buchan
• If you and sin are friends, you and God are not yet reconciled. C. Ryle
• Sin separates us from the presence of God, which is the source of all joy and indeed of all love, wisdom or good things of any sort. Since we were originally created for God’s immediate presence, only before his face will we thrive, flourish, and achieve our highest potential. If we were to lose his presence totally, that would be hell – the loss of our capacity for giving or receiving love or joy. Timothy Keller
• If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure. George MacDonald
• It is the very nature of sin to prevent man from meditating on spiritual things. Mary Martha Sherwood
• Our sin is what separates us from God. Paul David Tripp
• Sin is absence of God. Nothing more, nothing less. Simon Mawer
• Sin is essentially a departure from God. Martin Luther
• Sin and the child of God are incompatible. They may occasionally meet; they cannot live together in harmony. John Stott
• Sin is whatever obscures the soul. Andre Gide
• Sin is not wrong doing, it is wrong BEING, deliberate and emphatic independence of God. Oswald Chambers
• You never lose the love of God. Guilt is the warning that temporarily you are out of touch. Jack Dominian
• Men are not in hell because God is angry with them. They are in wrath and darkness because they have done to the light , which infinitely flows forth from God , as that man does to the light who puts out his own eyes . William Law

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Sin effects our connection with each other

• If it were not for sin, we should converse together as angels do. Benjamin Whichcote

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Sin often leads to pain and suffering…

• Religion informs us that misery and sin were produced together. The depravation of human will was followed by a disorder of the harmony of nature; and by that Providence which often places antidotes in the neighborhood of poisons, vice was checked by misery, lest it should swell to universal and unlimited dominion. Samuel Johnson
• Pain is the outcome of sin. Gautama Buddha

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…including the pain of guilt and the sting of conscience

• When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself. Anthony de Mello
• Guilt: punishing yourself before God doesn’t. Alan Cohen
• The more sinful and guilty a person tends to feel, the less chance there is that he will be a happy, healthy, or law- abiding citizen. He will become a compulsive wrong-doer. Albert Ellis
• The worst of evil befalling sinners is not an infliction from without, but arises out of the guilt of conscience within. Benjamin Whichcote
• It is certain, sin hath no real pleasures to bestow; they are all embittered, either by adverse strokes of providence from without, or painful and dreadful gripes and stings of conscience within. Wellins Calcott
• God hath yoked to guilt her pale tormentor,–misery. William C. Bryant
• It is not the real punishment. The only effectual one, the only deterrent and softening one, lies in the recognition of sin by conscience. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• There is nothing you can do to assuage your conscience when you commit sins. Crime is a spiritual assault on the soul.  Vikram Chatwal
• Men scanning the surface count the wicked happy; they see not the frightful dreams that crowd a bad man’s pillow. Martin Farquhar Tupper
• O Conscience, into what abyss of fears And horrors hast thou driven me, out of which I find no way, from deep to deeper plunged. John Milton
• Preserve your conscience always soft and sensitive. If but one sin force its way into that tender part of the soul and dwell there, the road is paved for a thousand iniquities. Isaac Watts
• Heart-suffering because of sin is the best proof that the Holy Spirit dwells in your heart. Johann Arndt

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…creating its own hell

• Sin makes its own hell, and goodness its own heaven. Mary Baker Eddy
• Most of God’s people are contented to be saved from the hell that is without; they are not so anxious to be saved from the hell that is within. Robert Murray M’Cheyne
• Actions that arise from consciousness levels below 200 are historically labeled as sin. All the great spiritual teachers admonished the populace to avoid sin because of its karmic consequences in the form of hells. David R. Hawkins
• Sin is dark and loves the dark, still hides from itself in gloom, and in the darkest hell is still itself the darkest hell and the severest woe. Robert Pollok

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Sin creates negative karma

• People get into a heavy-duty sin and guilt trip, feeling that if things are going wrong, that means that they did something bad and they are being punished. That’s not the idea at all. The idea of karma is that you continually get the teachings that you need to open your heart. To the degree that you didn’t understand in the past how to stop protecting your soft spot, how to stop armoring your heart, you’re given this gift of teachings in the form of your life, to give you everything you need to open further. Pema Chodron
• Has it occurred to you that transmigration is at once an explanation and a justification of the evil of the world ? If the evils we suffer are the result of sins committed in our past lives, we can bear them with resignation and hope that if in this one we strive toward virtue our future lives will be less afflicted. William Somerset Maugham

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Sin begets more sin

• A sturdy, hardened sinner shall advance to the utmost pitch of impiety, with less reluctance than he took the first step while his conscience was yet vigilant and tender. Francis Atterbury
• After the first blush of sin comes its indifference. Henry David Thoreau
• Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a crime.
• He that avoideth not small faults, by little and little falleth into greater. Thomas a Kempis
• It is a great deal easier to commit a second sin, than it was to commit the first; and a great deal harder to repent of a second, than it was to repent of the first. Benjamin Whichcote
• One leak will sink a ship, and one sin will destroy a sinner. John Bunyan
• So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in wickedness, till we grow invulnerable by conscience; and that sentinel, once dozed, sleeps fast, not to be awakened while the tide of pleasure continues to flow or till something dark and dreadful brings us to ourselves again. Daniel Defoe
• The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat one’s self. All sin is easy after that. Pearl Bailey
• The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of bad men, and, growing like them, to fly from the conversation of the good, and be cut off from them, and cleave to and follow after the company of the bad. Plato
• The malignity of sin does, in time, vitiate the principles of Nature; and the sinner comes to live entirely by sense and passion, who has been wont to put a violence upon judgment, reason, and conscience. Benjamin Whichcote

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For all these reasons, sin is equated with a kind of death

• Be killing sin or it will be killing you. John Owen
• God’s wounds cure, sin’s kisses kill. William Gurnall
• If sin rules in me, God’s life in me will be killed; if God rules in me, sin in me will be killed. Oswald Chambers
• Sinful and forbidden pleasures are like poisoned bread; they may satisfy appetite for the moment, but there is death in them at the end. Edwards Tryon
• Sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Francis Quarles
• Sin hath the devil for its father, shame for its companion, and death for its wages. Thomas J. Watson, Sr.
• The wages of sin are death, but by the time taxes are taken out, it’s just sort of a tired feeling. Paula Poundstone
• For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Bible
• Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin. Mary Baker Eddy
• Anger and just rebuke, and judgment given, That brought into this world a world of woe, Sin and her shadow Death, and Misery, Death’s harbinger. John Milton

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Therefore to sin is not so much to go against God as to go against yourself

• A sin is anything you do which goes against yourself. Miguel Angel Ruiz