Confession Quotes
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Let it be known that this is the true Church, in which there is confession and penance and which takes a health-promoting care of the sins and wounds to which the weak flesh is subject.
Lactantius
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All confessions are Odysseys.
Raymond Queneau
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But . . . I may as well say what I should not otherwise have said, that I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
Michel Foucault
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I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
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My most memorable recognition story was in Venice, Italy. My fiance and I were renting a car, and I was recognized by the person standing behind me by my voice. I thought that was hysterical!
Erica Cerra
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Confession of one's guilt purifies and uplifts. Its suppression is degrading and should always be avoided.
Mahatma Gandhi
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If you would know whether you have made a good confession, ask yourself I you have resolved to abandon your sins.
Bernard of Clairvaux
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Confessions may be good for the soul but they are bad for the reputation.
Thomas Dewar
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Candlesticks and incense not being portable into the maintop, the sailor perceives these decorations to be, on the whole, inessential to a maintop mass. Sails must be set and cables bent, be it never so strict a saint's day; and it is found that no harm comes of it. Absolution on a lee-shore must be had of the breakers, it appears, if at all; and they give plenary and brief without listening to confession.
John Ruskin
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People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.
Josh Stewart
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After the confession, still inside his sleeping, a massive boil shaped like a bird’s egg appears on his left hand between his point finger and his thumb. When medics drain the boil, from the pustule’s face floods a creamy darkish oil. The runoff will be stored in a glass vial in a black locker several miles from Gravey’s fleshy self, no one seeing what the wet does in the darkness when no longer watched.
Blake Butler
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The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.
George Eliot
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If we knew that we would meet the Lord tomorrow - through our premature death or through His unexpected coming - what would we do today? What confessions would we make? What practices would we discontinue? What accounts would we settle? What forgivenesses would we extend? What testimonies would we bear? If we would do those things then, why not now?
Dallin H. Oaks
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But all they want to do Is tie the poem to a chair with rope And torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose To find out what it really means.
William Collins
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The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.
Michiko Kakutani
