Confession Quotes - Page 9

• I do seem to favor a deathbed confession as the occasion for my dramatic monologues.

  Norman Lock

  Favors, Dramatic, Monologues

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.

  Rachel Gibson

  New York, Book, Writing

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• There are, I believe, many more false confessions to murders than true confessions.

  Bill James

  Believe, I Believe, Murder

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• If I cried me a river of all my confessions, would I drown in my shallow regret?

  Sarah McLachlan

  Regret, Sadness, Rivers

  Song: Black, Album: Solace

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• Either [Jesus] was what he said he was or he was the world's greatest liar. It is impossible for me to believe a liar or charlatan could have had the effect on mankind that he has had for 2000 years. We could ask, would even the greatest of liars carry his lie through the crucifixion, when a simple confession would have saved him? ... Did he allow us the choice... to believe in his teaching but reject his statements about his own identity?

  Ronald Reagan

  Jesus, Liars, Lying

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• Such is the effect of the grace of God in the heart of a pilgrim; while on one hand he sees the propensity of his evil nature to every sin which has been committed by others, and is humbled; he also confesses, that, by no power of his own, is he preserved, but ever gives the glory to the God of all grace, by whose power alone he is kept from falling.

  John Bunyan

  Fall, Heart, Hands

  John Bunyan (1869). “The Select Works of John Bunyan: Containing the Pilgrim's Progress ... with a Life of the Author”, p.85

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• I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams.

  Oskar Kokoschka

  Dream, Memories, Moving

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• I never felt scandal and confession were necessary to be an actress. I've never revealed my self or even my body in films. Mystery is very important.

  Claudia Cardinale

  Self, Important, Body

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• The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices, both ecclesiastical and temporal, which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds, and confessions of faith. They all believe that great Principle which has produced this boundless universe, Newton's universe and Herschell's universe, came down to this little ball, to be spit upon by Jews. And until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there never will be any liberal science in the world.

  John Adams

  Believe, Principles, Prejudice

  John Adams (2004). “The Portable John Adams”, p.525, Penguin

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• The great modern novel of the comic-pathetic illusion of freedom is Confessions of Zeno .

  Italo Svevo

  Modern Novel, Illusion, Comic

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• I believe that there never was a creator of a philosophical system who did not confess at the end of his life that he had wasted his time. It must be admitted that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men that the inventors of syllogisms. He who imagined a ship towers considerably above him who imagined innate ideas.

  Voltaire

  Art, Believe, Philosophical

  Francois Voltaire (1977). “The Portable Voltaire”, p.121, Penguin

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• Nobody likes to be found out, not even one who has made ruthless confession a part of his profession. Any autobiographer, therefore, at least between the lines, spars with his reader and potential judge.

  Erik Erikson

  Judging, Lines, Likes

  Erik H. Erikson (1977). “Life History and the Historical Moment: Diverse Presentations”, p.142, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Women's vulnerability confessing their desire to see men as a success object is matched by men's confession of compulsiveness of sexual desire for women.

  Warren Farrell

  Men, Desire, Objects

  "Why Men Are the Way They Are". Book by Warren Farrell, 1986.

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• The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

  George Eliot

  Honesty, Attitude, Spring

  George Eliot (1863). “Romola”, p.112

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• The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, Civilization, Mind

  Quoted by Lloyd Osbourne in 'The Death of Stevenson', preface To Tusitala edition of Weir of Hermiston (published 1924).

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• If the melody is telling me this is what the song is about, then I'm sort of forced into confession, autobiography or fantasy. If I don't do that, I've hamstrung the melody.

  Ben Folds

  Song, Fantasy, Autobiography

  Source: www.billboard.com

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• While Socrates empties the cup of poison with unshaken soul,Christ exclaims,'If it is possible, let this cup pass from me'.Christ in this respect is the self- confession of human sensibility.

  Ludwig Feuerbach

  Self, Soul, Poison

  Ludwig Feuerbach (1855). “The Essence of Christianity”, p.90

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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

  Animal, Men, Needs

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.59, Vintage

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• Art has to be a kind of confession. I don't mean a true confession in the sense of that dreary magazine. The effort it seems to me, is: if you can examine and face your life, you can discover the terms with which you are connected to other lives, and they can discover them, too - the terms with which they are connected to other people.

  James A. Baldwin

  Art, Mean, People

  Interview with Studs Terkel (1961), as quoted in "Conversations With James Baldwin" edited by Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt, May 1, 1989.

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• What right has a man to ask Jesus to forgive him, when his heart is still burning with hatred or festering with grudges against a fellow-creature? Confession, to be of any avail, must let go of its hold on the sin confessed.

  Theodore L. Cuyler

  Letting Go, Jesus, Heart

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers". Book by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 155, 1895.

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• By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical.

  Georges Bataille

  Thinking, Mystical Experiences, Ties

  Georges Bataille (1988). “Inner Experience”, p.3, SUNY Press

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• A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs masterpieces.

  Mary Antin

  Men, Unfinished Work, Yesterday

  Mary Antin (2013). “The Promised Land”, p.12, Courier Corporation

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• I once told you that I am not a saint, and I hope never to see the day that I cannot admit having made a mistake. So I will close with another confession. Frequently, along the tortuous road of recent months from this chamber to the Presidents House, I protested that I was my own man. Now I realize that I was wrong. I am your man, for it was your carefully weighed confirmation that changed my occupation. The truth is I am the peoples man, for you acted in their name, and I accepted and began my new and solemn trust with a promise to serve all the people and do the best that I can for America.

  Gerald R. Ford

  Mistake, Men, Names

  United States. President (1974-1977 : Ford), Gerald R. Ford (1975). “Gerald R. Ford: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President”

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• I have never united myself to any church because I found difficulty in giving my assent without mental reservation to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize the articles of belief and the usual confession of faith.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Christian, Long, Giving

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• ...the very notion that a candidate should openly solicit votes violated the principled presumption that such behavior itself represented a confession of unworthiness for national office.

  Joseph J. Ellis

  Office, Vote, Behavior

  Joseph J. Ellis (2003). “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation”, p.162, Vintage

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