So the human heart was created in the context of the perfection of the garden of Eden. But we don't live there now. This is why our instincts keep firing off the lie that perfection is possible. We have pictures of perfection etched into the very DNA of our souls.

With the fullness of God, we are free to let humans be humans—fickle and fragile and forgetful.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.

I daresay we've heard a bit about original sin, but not nearly enough about original glory, which comes before sin and is deeper to our nature. We were crowned with glory and honor. Why does a woman long to be beautiful? Why does a man hope to be found brave? Because we remember, if only faintly, that we were once more than we are now.

History is riddled with blood and sin.

Yet only when we come to understand, in the light of the Cross, the evil we are capable of, and have even been a part of, can we experience true remorse and true repentance.

If it were left to us, we would all fall away from the faith and perish.

Perfection isn't attainable, that's why we demand it from others.

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

Out of such prison, though Spirits of purest light,   Purest at first, now gross by sinning grown.

up they rose As from unrest; and, each the other viewing, Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds How darkened. Innocence, that, as a veil, Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone; Just confidence, and native righteousness, And honour, from about them, naked left To guilty shame; He covered, but his robe Uncovered more.