"The Catholic religion does not bind us to confess our sins indiscriminately to everybody; it allows them to remain hidden from all other men save one, to whom she bids us reveal the innermost recesses of our heart, and show ourselves as we are. There is only this one man in the world whom she orders us to undeceive, and she binds him to an inviolable secrecy, which makes this knowledge to him as if it were not. Can we imagine anything more charitable and pleasant? And yet the corruption of man is such that he finds even this law harsh; and it is one of the main reasons which has caused a great part of Europe to rebel against the Church. How unjust and unreasonable is the heart of man, which feels it disagreeable to be obliged to do in regard to one man what in some measure it were right to do to all men! For is it right that we should deceive men?"
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Pens%C3%A9es
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Pensées
335 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Pensées →
Related Quotes
"Justice is as much a matter of fashion as charm is."
"Mais c'est une ignorance savante qui se connaît."
"Nothing is surer than that the people will be weak."
"One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person."
"The manner in which Epictetus, Montaigne, and Salomon de Tultie wrote, is the most usual, the most suggestive, the mo…"
"La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première."
"Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other. But this is not …"
"Symmetry is what we see at a glance; based on the fact that there is no reason for any difference..."
"I cannot imagine a man without thought; he would be a stone or an animal."
"Equality of possessions is no doubt right, but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might."