Confessors Quotes & Sayings

The true confessors have been aware that not only is life mostly failure, but that in one's failure or pettiness or wrongness exists the living drama of the self. — Gore Vidal

Los Padres have everything and the people have nothing; 'tis the masterpiece of reason and justice. For my part, I know nothing so divine as Los Padres who make war on Kings of Spain and Portugal and in Europe act as their confessors; who here kill Spaniards and at Madrid send them to Heaven. — Voltaire

The next moment she feared lest this answer to his blessing might be irreverent, wrong - might hurt him as coming from his daughter, and she threw her arms round his neck. He held her to him for a minute or two. She heard him murmur to himself, 'The martyrs and confessors had even more pain to bear - I will not shrink. — Elizabeth Gaskell

In teaching color, you teach people how to look something and see the tone in it and break it down to be able to paint it and reproduce that color. But then, I'm psychedelic, so I look at color differently. I like colors that are in contrast with one another, so that they flicker back and forth. — John Van Hamersveld

When it comes to Chinese food I have always operated under the policy that the less known about the preparation the better. A wise diner who is invited to visit the kitchen replies by saying, as politely as possible, that he has a pressing engagement elsewhere. — Calvin Trillin

Heaven, too, was very near to them in those days. God's direct agency was to be seen in the thunder and the rainbow, the whirlwind and the lightning. To the believer, clouds of angels and confessors, and martyrs, armies of the sainted and the saved, were ever stooping over their struggling brethren upon earth, raising, encouraging, and supporting them. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. — H.G.Wells

The new psychiatrists say that everything and anything can be traced back to sexual causes. Their method, for example, could be explained as the eroticism of father confessors. — Karl Kraus

An existential faith is a hot, committed view of the world layered into the affective dispositions, habits and institutional priorities of its confessors. The intensity of commitment to it typically exceeds the power of the arguments and evidence advanced. On my reading, then, each thinker listed above is a carrier of a distinctive existential faith. The faith in which each is invested has not yet been established in a way that rules out of court every perspective except it. It is a contestable faith. This is not to deny that impressive, comparative considerations might be offered on its behalf, or that it might be subjected to critical interrogations that press its advocates to adjust this or that aspect of it. An existential faith is not immune to new argument and evidence, as I will try to show; commitment to it, rather, is seldom exhausted by them. — Ian Shapiro

Half-instructed confessors have done my soul great harm; for I could not always have such learned ones as I would have desired. They certainly did not wish to deceive me, but the fact was that they knew no better. Of something which was a venial sin, they said it was no sin, and out of a very grave mortal sin they made a venial sin. This has done me such harm, that my speaking here of so great an evil, as a warning to others, will be readily understood. — Teresa Of Avila

Religious people spend so much time with their confessors because they like to talk about themselves. — Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

Psychoanalysts are father confessors who like to listen to the sins of the father as well. — Karl Kraus

I wanted to write about women and their work, and about valuing the work we, as women, choose to do. Too many women I knew disparaged their work. Many working mothers thought they ought to be home with their children instead, so they carried around too much guilt to enjoy much job satisfaction. — Jennifer Chiaverini

And he who has dwelt with his heart alone, Hears all the music in friendship's tone. So better and better I comprehend How sorrow ever would be our friend. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so contemptible as the public that buys their books. — W. H. Auden

Obviously, New York and Boston and Los Angeles have pretty vibrant entrepreneurial scenes. — Jason Calacanis

Old age adds to the respect due to virtue, but it takes nothing from the contempt inspired by vice; it whitens only the hair. — Ira Gershwin

Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. — Maggie Stiefvater

He who observes the infinite horizons will see the dangers before others. — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Illustrious confessors of Jesus Christ, a Christian finds in prison the same joys as the prophets tasted in the desert. Call it not a dungeon, but a solitude. When the soul is in heaven, the body feels not the weight of fetters; it carries the whole man along with it. — Tertullian

Men die nightly in their beds, wringing the hands of ghostly confessors ... on account of the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed. — Edgar Allan Poe

The expression 'to lose one's faith', as one might a purse or a ring of keys, has always seemed to me rather foolish. It must be one of those sayings of bourgeois piety, a legacy of those wretched priests of the eighteenth century who talked so much.

Faith is not a thing which one 'loses', we merely cease to shape our lives by it. That is why old-fashioned confessors are not far wrong in showing a certain amount of scepticism when dealing with 'intellectual crises', doubtless far more rare than people imagine. An educated man may come by degrees to tuck away his faith in some back corner of his brain, where he can find it again on reflection, by an effort of memory: yet even if he feels a tender regret for what no longer exists and might have been, the term 'faith' would nevertheless be inapplicable to such an abstraction, no more like real faith, to use a very well-worn simile, than the constellation of Cygne is like a swan. — Georges Bernanos

O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.
-Augustine St. Clare — Harriet Beecher Stowe

It seemed that out of every tear of a martyr new confessors were born, and that every groan on the arena found an echo in thousands of breasts. Caesar was swimming in blood, Rome and the whole pagan world was mad.

But those who had had enough of transgression and madness, those who were trampled upon, those whose lives were misery and oppression, all the weighed down, all the sad, all the unfortunate, came to hear the wonderful tidings of God, who out of love for men had given Himself to be crucified and redeem their sins.

When they found a God whom they could love, they had found that which the society of the time could not give any one, -- happiness and love. — Henryk Sienkiewicz

People are looking for someone to listen to them. Someone willing to grant them time, to listen to their dramas and difficulties. This is what I call the "apostolate of the ear," and it is important. Very important. I feel compelled to say to confessors: talk, listen with patience, and above all tell people that God loves them. — Pope Francis

By the time I actually recorded Bitter Tears I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage; I felt every word of those songs ... I expected there to be trouble with that album, and there was ... when it was released, many radio stations wouldn't play it ... The very idea of unconventional or even original ideas ending up on "country" radio in the late 1990s is absurd. — Johnny Cash

I guess you've got a spice of temper," commented Mr. Harrison, surveying the flushed cheeks and indignant eyes opposite him. "It goes with hair like yours, I reckon — L.M. Montgomery

The Church is that one wherein the true word of God is preached, which Christ left to His Apostles, which the same Church hath always observed, the doctors preached, and Martyrs and confessors witnessed. This is the Church I believe to be true. — Margaret Clitherow

A secret is a strange thing. There are three kinds of secrets. One is the sort everyone knows about, the sort you need at least two people for. One to keep it. One to never know. The second is a harder kind of secret: one you keep from yourself. Every day, thousands of confessions are kept from their would-be confessors, none of these people knowing that their never-admitted secrets all boil down to the same three words: I am afraid. And then there is the third kind of secret, the most hidden kind. A secret no one knows about. Perhaps it was known once, but was taken to the grave. Or maybe it is a useless mystery, arcane and lonely, unfound because no one ever looked for it. — Maggie Stiefvater

Christ has come into the world to lay out a garden wherein, amid splendor and abundance, there should thrive the violet of humanity, the myrtle of mortification, the rose of love, the lily of virginal souls, the laurel of confessors and the palm of martyrs. — Fr James Groenings