REPENTANCE QUOTES III
quotations about repentance
Repentance is the key with which we can unlock the prison from inside. We hold that key within our hands, and agency is ours to use it.
CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST OF LATTER-DAY SAINTS
Official Report of the Annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Volume 158
Who after his transgression doth repent,
Is half, or altogether, innocent.
ROBERT HERRICK
Hesperides
In true repentance, wrought by the Holy Spirit through the application of divine truth to the mind and conscience, though there may be much fear, much of well-founded apprehension, and a painful sense of guilt and danger, yet there will be some intermingling of hope. The penitent himself may not always be very distinctly conscious of it, until he come more carefully to examine the state of his mind. He may at particular seasons be almost overwhelmed by distress and by apprehension; yet, in every true penitent there is a hope, a measure of hope, however at seasons faint and indistinct. And his hope is, that God, who has wounded him, will undertake to heal him; and that he shall soon be brought to experience the pardon of his sin, and adoption into the family of God.
JABEZ BUNTING
Sermons
Repentance is faith's usher, and dews all her way with tears.
THOMAS ADAMS
The Works of Thomas Adams: Being the Sum of His Sermons
Repentance is a change of mind, or a conversion from sin to God; not some one bare act of change, but a lasting, durable state of new life, which is called regeneration.
HENRY HAMMOND
attributed, Day's Collacon
True Repentance is that saving grace wrought in the soul by the spirit of God, whereby a sinner is made to see and be sensible of his sin, is grieved and humbled before God on account of it, not so much for the punishment to which sin has made him liable, as that thereby God is dishonoured and offended, his laws violated, and his own soul polluted and defiled; and this grief arises from love to God, and is accompanied with an hatred of sin, a fixed resolution to forsake it, and expectation of favour and forgiveness through the merits of Christ.
WELLINS CALCOTT
Thoughts Moral and Divine
Repentance is the debt one owes to virtue.
EDWARD COUNSEL
Maxims
Let not neither the tears of natural tenderness, nor the sudden terrors of conscious guilt, be mistaken for genuine repentance.
JOHN THORNTON
Maxims and Directions for Youth
He that repents every day for the sins of every day, when he comes to die will have the sins but of one day to repent of; short reckonings make long friends.
PHILIP HENRY
attributed, Christian Dogmatics
Repent TODAY, because refusal to do so is inconsistent with a desire to repent. Unconverted persons never more decieve themselves than when they plead that they have a sincere wish to return to God. If you credit their assertions, there is nothing which they so strongly desire as to have experience of true religion. But such a desire, if genuine, would instantly break up all these habits of indolent lingering. He who desires to be healed, flies to the physician. He who means to escape shipwreck, loses not a moment in lashing himself to some buoyant material. He who craves deliverance from conflagration, instantly rushes from amidst the flaming timbers. And he who longs to be saved, puts aside every other interest and engagement as unimportant, and devotes all the energies of his soul to this single point, that he may escape from the wrath to come.
JAMES WADDEL ALEXANDER
The Revival and Its Lessons
Repentance is the renewal of life. This means we must free ourselves from all our negative traits and turn toward absolute good. No sin is unforgivable except the sin of unrepentance.
THADDEUS OF VITOVNICA
Our Thoughts Determine Our Lives
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!
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
Whatever we may be there are voices which call us to repentance; nature as well as our whole life is full of them, only our ears are heavy and will not hear.
FRIEDRICH WILHELM KRUMMACHER
The Suffering Saviour: Or, Meditations on the Last Days of Christ
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.
SOREN KIERKEGAARD
Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
True repentance has a double aspect: it looks upon things past with a weeping eye, and upon the future with a watchful eye.
ROBERT SOUTH
Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions
Many persons who appear to repent, are like sailors who throw their goods overboard in a storm, and wish for them again in a calm.
MEAD
attributed, Day's Collacon
People don't do what they believe in, they just do what's most convenient, then they repent.
BOB DYLAN
"Brownsville Girl"
Wooing, wedding, and repenting is as a Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace: the first suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical; the wedding, mannerly modest, as a measure, full of state and ancientry; and then comes repentance, and, with his bad legs, falls into the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into his grave.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Much Ado about Nothing
While repentance is indispensable to eternal life, we are not to regard it in the light of a price paid for its possession. It is not an expiatory grace, or a compensation for moral indebtedness.
GEORGE C. LORIMER
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Men are born to sin ... What does matter most, is not that we err, it is that we do benefit from our mistakes, that we are capable of sincere repentance, of genuine contrition.
SHARON KAY PENMAN
The Sunne in Splendour