Contrition Quotes
Our preaching does not stop with the law. That would lead to wounding without binding up, striking down and not healing, killing and not making alive, driving down to hell and not bringing back up, humbling and not exalting. Therefore, we must also preach grace and the promise of forgiveness - this is the means by which faith is awakened and properly taught. Without this word of grace, the law, contrition, penitence, and everything else are done and taught in vain.
Martin Luther
I think Rummy should walk up to the table, take the oath, offer his prepared apologies and explanations and then, at the end of his remarks, he should take out a long Japanese knife. He should then cut off his pinky. If this Yakuza style contrition doesn't work he should look to the ranking Democrat on the committee and continue removing fingers until he gets a Shogun-like nod that his offering is acceptable. He should then wrap-up up his hand, curtly bow, and then say 'I am now pleased to take your questions.
Jonah Goldberg
One day she was playing on the swing when her father passed and called to her, "Come and give me a kiss, my little queen." Dérange-toi, Papa! Thérèse replied pertly - an untranslatable compound of "Come for it yourself" and "If you want it, you'll have to go the trouble of getting it", with perhaps even, "Don't be so lazy." Her father went by with a grave expression, but without a word, while Marie said: "You naughty little thing, how can you be so rude to your father?" I got off the swing at once; I had really learned my lesson, and the whole house echoed with my cries of contrition.
Thérèse of Lisieux
Thus in the time of our pain and our woe He sheweth us Cheer of His Passion and His Cross, helping us to bear it by His own blessed virtue. And in the time of our sinning He sheweth to us Cheer of Ruth and Pity, mightily keeping us and defending us against all our enemies. And these be the common Cheer which He sheweth to us in this life; therewith mingling the third: and that is His Blissful Cheer, like, in part, as it shall be in Heaven. And that by gracious touching and sweet lighting of the spiritual life, whereby that we are kept in sure faith, hope, and charity, with contrition and devotion, and also with contemplation and all manner of true solace and sweet comforts.
Julian of Norwich
The Second came to my mind with contrition; Freely desiring that sickness so hard as to death, that I might in that sickness receive all my rites of Holy Church, myself thinking that I should die, and that all creatures might suppose the same that saw me: for I would have no manner of comfort of earthly life. In this sickness I desired to have all manner of pains bodily and ghostly that I should have if I should die, (with all the dreads and tempests of the fiends) except the outpassing of the soul. And this I meant for I would be purged, by the mercy of God, and afterward live more to the worship of God because of that sickness. And that for the more furthering in my death: for I desired to be soon with my God.
Julian of Norwich
Sin is the sharpest scourge that any chosen soul may be smitten with: which scourge thoroughly beateth man and woman, and maketh him hateful in his own sight, so far forth that afterwhile he thinketh himself he is not worthy but as to sink in hell, - till when contrition taketh him by touching of the Holy Ghost, and turneth the bitterness into hopes of God's mercy.
Julian of Norwich
The Oxford group movement, imagining itself the mediator of Christ's salvation in a catastrophic age, is really an additional evidence of the decay in which we stand. Its religion manages to combine bourgeois complacency with Christian contrition in a manner which makes the former dominant. Its morality is a religious expression of a decadent individualism. Far from offering us a way out of our difficulties it adds to the general confusion. This is not the gospel's message of judgement and hope to the world. It is bourgeois optimism, individualism and moralism expressing itself in the guise of religion. No wonder the rather jittery plutocrats of our day open their spacious summer homes to its message!
Reinhold Niebuhr
I was moved with contrition as with a strong agony, for I had been one of those who had endured that these things should be. Therefore now I found upon my garments the blood of this great multitude of strangled souls of my brothers. The voice of their blood cried out against me from the ground. Every stone of the reeking pavements, every brick of the pestilential rookeries, found a tongue and called after me as I fled: What hast thou done with thy brother Abel?
Edward Bellamy
Cheap grace means grace as a doctrine, a principle, a system. It means forgiveness of sins proclaimed as a general truth, the love of God taught as the Christian "conception" of God. An intellectual assent to that idea is held to be of itself sufficient to secure remission of sins. The church which holds the correct doctrine of grace has, it is supposed, ipso facto a part of that grace. In such a Church the world finds a cheap covering for its sins; no contrition is required, still less any real desire to be delivered from sin. Cheap grace therefore amounts to a denial of the living Word of God, in fact, a denial of the Incarnation of the Word of God.
Cheap grace means the justification of sin without the justification of the sinner. Grace alone does everything, they say, and so everything can remain as it was before.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Where I say that He abideth sorrowfully and moaning, it meaneth all the true feeling that we have in our self, in contrition and compassion, and all sorrowing and moaning that we are not oned with our Lord. And all such that is speedful, it is Christ in us. And though some of us feel it seldom, it passeth never from Christ till what time He hath brought us out of all our woe. For love suffereth never to be without pity.
Julian of Norwich
The pathology of Western intellectuals has committed them to an adversarial relationship with the culture - free markets and individual rights - that has produced the greatest alleviation of suffering; the greatest liberation from want, ignorance, and superstition; and the greatest increase of bounty and opportunity in the history of all human life. This pathology allows Western intellectuals to step around the Everest of bodies of the victims of Communism without a tear, a scruple, a regret, an act of contrition, or a reevaluation of self, soul, and mind.
Alan Charles Kors
