Confessing Quotes - Page 3

Storytelling has always been at the heart of being human because it serves some of our most basic needs: passing along our traditions, confessing failings, healing wounds, engendering hope, strengthening our sense of community.

Parker J. Palmer

Healing, Heart, Community

Parker J. Palmer (2009). “A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life”, p.122, John Wiley & Sons

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Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

Laurence J. Peter

Parent, Luck, Faults

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It is impossible for a man to be freed from the habit of sin before he hates it, just as it is impossible to receive forgiveness before confessing his trespasses. Ignatius
If I cast up a confessed, repented, and forsaken sin against another, and allow my remembrance of that sin to colour my thinking and feed my suspicions, then I know nothing of Calvary love.

Amy Carmichael

Forgiveness, Hate, Men

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The feeling of patriotism - It is an immoral feeling because, instead of confessing himself a son of God . . . or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the son of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and conscience.

Leo Tolstoy

Son, Men, Feelings

graf Leo Tolstoy (1989). “I Cannot be Silent: Writings on Politics, Art and Religion by Leo Tolstoy”

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All men thirst to confess their crimes more than tired beasts thirst for water; but they naturally object to confessing them while other people, who have also committed the same crimes, sit by and laugh at them.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Tired, Men, Water

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To be silent when we are impelled to utter words injurious to God or to our neighbour, is an act of virtue; but, to be silent in confessing our sins, is the ruin of the soul.

Alphonsus Liguori

Silence, Soul, Ruins

St. Alphonsus Liguori (2012). “Sermons of St. Alphonsus Liguori: For All the Sundays of the Year”, p.117, TAN Books

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The Galilean is not a favorite of mine. So far from owing him any thanks for his favor, I cannot avoid confessing that I owe a secret grudge to his carpentership.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Secret, Owing, Favors

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1988). “Shelley's Prose: Or the Trumpet of a Prophecy”

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There is a difference between admitting and confessing. Admitting involves softening, making excuses for things that cannot be excused; confessing just names the crimes at its full severity.

Veronica Roth

Names, Differences, Admitting

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As for our pupils talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it and have no guide but reason. Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one's mind and to give up a bad case on the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.

Michel de Montaigne

Giving Up, Integrity, Educational

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Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.

Abraham Pais

Liars, Believe, Writing

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For whenever unbaptized persons die confessing Christ, this confession is of the same efficacy for the remission of sins as if they were washed in the sacred font of baptism.

Saint Augustine

Baptized In, Baptism, Fonts

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Compassion- which means, literally, "to suffer with"- is the way to the truth that we are most ourselves, not when we differ from others, but when we are the same. Indeed the main spiritual question is not, "What difference do you make?" but "What do you have in common?" It is not "excelling" but "serving" that makes us most human. It is not proving ourselves to be better than others but confessing to be just like others that is the way to healing and reconciliation.

Henri Nouwen

Spiritual, Healing, Mean

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they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

George Orwell

Dog, Mind, Watches

George Orwell, A.M. Heath (2003). “Animal Farm and 1984”, p.69, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Know what your sin is and confess it; but do not imagine that you have approved yourself a penitent by confessing sin in the abstract.

Theodore L. Cuyler

Sin, Imagine, Abstract

"Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, (p. 449), 1895.

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We all spend so much time not saying what we want, because we know we can't have it. And because it sounds ungracious, or ungrateful, or disloyal, or childish, or banal. Or because we're so desperate to pretend that things are OK, really, that confessing to ourselves they're not looks like a bad move. Go on, say what you want. ... Whatever it is, say it to yourself. The truth will set you free. Either that or it'll get you a punch in the nose. Surviving in whatever life you're living means lying, and lying corrodes the soul, so take a break from the lies for just one minute.

Nick Hornby

Lying, Moving, Mean

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If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Martin Luther

Loyalty, Voice, Soldier

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Father asks frequently in his letters whether I fancy any Ayorthaian young lady or any in our acquaintance at home. I say no I suppose I'm confessing another fault: pride. I don't want him to know that I love if my affections are not returned

Gail Carson Levine

Father, Home, Pride

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... all this talking, this rather liquid confessing, was something I didn't think I could ever bring myself to do. It seemed foolhardy to me, like an uncooked egg deciding to to come out of its shell: there would be a risk of spreading out too far, turning into a formless puddle.

Margaret Atwood

Thinking, Talking, Eggs

Margaret Atwood (1999). “The Edible Woman”, Emblem Editions

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The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion.

Brennan Manning

Religious, Confused, Lying

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There's an honesty to the wolf world that is liberating. There's no diplomacy, no decorum. You tell your enemy you hate him; you show your admiration by confessing the truth. That directness doesn't work with humans, who are masters of subterfuge. Does this dress make me look fat? Do you really love me? Did you miss me? When a person asks this, she doesn't want to know the real answer. She wants you to lie to her. After two years of living with wolves, I had forgotten how many lies it takes to build a relationship.

Jodi Picoult

Honesty, Real, Lying

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So what do you have to confess now?" I don't know why I'm saying any of this, except that is the truth. "I'm confessing that I don't know if I'm ready for this." "What is 'this'?" "Being open. Being hurt. Liking. Not being liked. Seeing the flicker on. Seeing the flicker off. Leaping. Falling. Crashing.

David Levithan

Hurt, Fall, Ready

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The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

Marcel Proust

Communication, Animal, Inspire

Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.257, Modern Library

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When you can discover where the fresh colors of the faded flower abide, or the music of the broken lyre, seek life among the dead. Such are the anxious and fearful contemplations of the common observer, though the popular religion often prevents him from confessing them even to himself.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Flower, Color, Broken

Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.1814, Delphi Classics

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I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.

Charles Darwin

Opinion, Murder, Origin Of Species

Charles Darwin, James T. Costa (2009). “The Annotated Origin: A Facsimile of the First Edition of On the Origin of Species”, p.6, Harvard University Press

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When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.

H. P. Lovecraft

Drama, Writing, Trying

Letter to E. Hoffman Price (29 September 1933), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 579), 1996.

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