Emotions

"'Tis to bewail the sins thou didst commit; And not commit those sins thou hast bewailed. He that bewails, and not forsakes them too, Confesses rather what he means to do."

"Nor alms, nor deeds, that I have done, Can for a single sin atone; To Calvary alone I flee; O God! be merciful to me."

"Cave ne quidquam incipias, quod post pœniteat."

"Velox consilium sequitur pœnitentia."

"Nec unquam primi consilii deos pœnitet."

"And while the lamp holds out to burn, The vilest sinner may return."

"Der Wahn ist kurtz, die Reu ist lang."

"But with the morning cool repentance came."

"True repentance is to cease from sin."

"Nam sera nunquam est ad bonos mores via. Quem pœnitet peccasse, pæne est innocens."

"He comes never late who comes repentant."

"Woman, amends may never come too late."

"Who after his transgression doth repent, Is halfe, or altogether, innocent."

"God dropped a spark down into everyone, And if we find and fan it to a blaze, It'll spring up and glow, like—like the sun, And light the wandering out of stony ways."

"When iron scourge, and tort'ring hour The bad affright, afflict the best."

"He [Cato] used to say that in all his life he never repented but of three things. The first was that he had trusted a woman with a secret; the second that he had gone by sea when he might have gone by land; and the third, that he had passed one day without having a will by him."

"There is one case of death-bed repentance recorded — the penitent thief — that no one should despair; and only one, that no one should presume."

"Restore to God his due in tithe and time: A tithe purloin'd cankers the whole estate."

"O that we would therefore, while we are on this side of the grave, make our peace with God! Tomorrow may be our dying day; let this be our repenting day."

"Repentance is purgative; fear not the working of this pill."

"Chacun s'égare, et le moins imprudent, Est celui-là qui plus tôt se repent."

"D'uomo è il fallir, ma dal malvagio il buono Scerne il dolor del fallo."

"It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person’s pride."

"Above all, repentance; not wholesale repentance: “I have sinned, father, I have sinned,” or, still worse, the admission that I am wholly in sin, that I was born in sin, that every step of mine is sin. This admission, collecting, compacting all the sins in one heap, seems to separate them from me and deprives me of that inevitable spiritual use, which by the mercy of God is attached to every sin. ... We have a terrible habit of forgetting,—of forgetting our evil, our sins. And there is no more radical means for forgetting our sins, than wholesale repentance. All the sins are boiled down, as it were, into one impermeable mass, with which nothing can be done."

"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."

"When prodigals return great things are done."

"On the one hand, there is the type of sinner whom, in present-day language, we would call ‘oppressor.’ Their basic sin consists in oppressing, placing intolerable burdens on others, acting unjustly and so on. On the other hand, there are those who sin ‘from weakness’ or those ‘legally considered sinners’ according to the dominant religious view.Jesus takes a very different approach to each group. He offers salvation to all, and makes demands of all, but in a very different way. He directly demands a radical conversion of the first group, an active cessation from oppressing. For these, the coming of the Kingdom is above all a radical need to stop being oppressors."

"Abba Moses asked Abba Silvanus, "Can a man lay a new foundation every day?" The old man said, "If he works hard, he can lay a new foundation at every moment.""

"When reason’s voice, Loud as the voice of Nature, shall have waked The nations; and mankind perceive that vice Is discord, war and misery; that virtue Is peace and happiness and harmony; When man’s maturer nature shall disdain The playthings of its childhood; -kingly glare Will lose its power to dazzle, its authority Will silently pass by; the gorgeous throne Shall stand unnoticed in the regal hall, Fast falling to decay; whilst falsehood’s trade Shall be as hateful and unprofitable As that of truth is now."

"Amid the roses, fierce Repentance rears Her snaky crest; a quick-returning pang Shoots through the conscious heart."

"I do not buy repentance at so heavy a cost as a thousand drachmæ."

"Come back then, O, them prodigal, to thy Father. Quit thy sad folly and emptiness, thy reproaches of soul, thy diseased longings, and thy restless sighs. Return again to thy God, and give thyself to Him in a final and last sacrifice. Conquer again, as Christ will help you, the original love, in that to abide and rest."

"And wet his grave with my repentant tears."

"The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior."

"The beauty of repentance is that it transforms shame into wisdom, sin into experience."

"μετανοήσατε οὖν καὶ ἐπιστρέψατε πρὸς τὸ ἐξαλειφθῆναι ὑμῶν τὰς ἁμαρτίας."

"Sinners and those who do not confess due to shame deliver their soul unto death. They suffer in a similar fashion to those who are ill, who do not run to the doctors because of shame."

"Of my past wanderings the sole fruit is shame, And deep repentance, of the knowledge born That all we value in this world is naught."

"In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, and saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."

"When the scourge Inexorable, and the torturing hour Calls us to penance."

"What then? what rests? Try what repentance can: what can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that struggling to be free Art more engag'd!"

"The manic lover does not love his beloved as much as God loves the repentant soul."

"Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons."

"When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, "Repent," he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance."

"Repentance is as absolute a condition of the covenant of grace as faith; and as necessary to be performed as that … not only a sorrow for sins past, but (what is a natural consequence of such sorrow, if it be real) a turning from them into a new and contrary life. … Repentance is an hearty sorrow for our past misdeeds, AND a sincere resolution and endeavour, to the utmost of our power, to conform all our actions to the law of God. So that repentance does not consist in one single act of sorrow, (though that being the first and leading act gives denomination to the whole,) but in "doing works meet for repentance" in a sincere obedience to the law of Christ, the remainder of our lives."

"The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; As it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins."

"The intellect of one who sins is not destroyed (as some of you think), just as the physical size of the moon does not diminish, but only its light. Through repentance a man regains his true splendor, just as the moon after the period of waning clothes itself once more in its full light."

"They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance."

"Well, I'll repent, and that suddenly, while I am in some liking; I shall be out of heart shortly, and then I shall have no strength to repent."

"The godly grief of repentance and the concern of inwardness must above all not be confused with impatience. Experience teaches that to repent at once is not always even the right time to repent, because in this moment of haste, when the engaged thoughts and various passions are still busily in motion or at least tensed in the relaxation, repentance can so easily be mistaken about what really should be repented, can so easily confuse itself with the opposite: with momentary remorse, that is, with impatience; with a painful, tormentingly worldly grief, that is, with impatience. But impatience, however long it continues to rage, however darkened the mind becomes, never becomes repentance; its weeping, however convulsed with sobs, never becomes the weeping of repentance; its tears are as devoid of beneficent fruitfulness as clouds without ran, as a spasmodic shower. But if a person incurred some greater guilt but also improved and year by year steadily made progress in the good, it is certain that year after year, with greater inwardness-all in proportion to his progress in the greater inwardness-he will repent of that guilt from which he year after year distances himself in the temporal sense. It is indeed true that guilt must stand vividly before a person if he is truly to repent, but momentary repentance is very dubious and is not to be hoped for at all simply because it perhaps is not the deep inwardness of concern that sets forth the guilt so vividly, but only a momentary feeling. Then regret is selfish, sensuous, sensuously powerful in the moment, inflamed in expression, impatient in the most contradictory overstatements-and for this very reason it is not repentance."