10 quotes found
"Remorse is not among the eternal verities. The Greeks were right to dethrone her. Her action is too capricious, as though the Erinyes selected for punishment only certain men and certain sins. And of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil."
"Farewell, remorse: all good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my good."
"The real affliction of old age is remorse."
"High minds, of native pride and force, Most deeply feel thy pangs, Remorse; Fear, for their scourge, mean villains have, Thou art the torturer of the brave!"
"Abandon all remorse; On horror's head horrors accumulate."
"It occurred to him that what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending."
"Cruel Remorse! where Youth and Pleasure sport, And thoughtless Folly keeps her court,— Crouching 'midst rosy bowers thou lurk'st unseen Slumbering the festal hours away, While Youth disports in that enchanting scene; Till on some fated day Thou with a tiger-spring dost leap upon thy prey, And tear his helpless breast, o'erwhelmed with wild dismay."
"Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost Weeps only tears of poison."
"Man, wretched man, whene'er he stoops to sin, Feels, with the act, a strong remorse within."
"Le remords s'endort durant un destin prospère et s'aigrit dans l'adversité."