Quotes About Penance

He could hardly imagine anymore what his life would be without the weight of his hidden knowledge. He'd come to think of it as a kind of penance. It was self-destructive, he could see that, but that was the way things were. People smoked, they jumped out of airplanes, they drank too much and got into their cars and drove without seat belts.

The sin which makes you sad and repentant is more liked by Allah than the good deed which turns you arrogant.

She'd only gotten what she deserved. No penance could wash away her sins. Not really.

Like certain devotees, who think they can fool God and wrest a pardon by paying lip-service to prayer and adopting the humble attitude of the penitent, Therese humiliated herself, beat her chest, found words of repentance, without having anything in the bottom of her heart except fear and cowardice.

For every person who atones, a hundred others find regret sufficient.

He thought of night coming on. He thought of the loneliness of tonight, this first night in the ground. This, he thought, was the moment when the dead must first feel truly alone. This was the moment when the dead, in loneliness, feel the first stirrings of the long penance of decay. This was the moment when the dead realize the truth: This is it, it will never be different. To be dead, he thought, that was to know that nothing would ever be different.

now, I am doing penance for my selfishness. Who knew I'd see the world through the drain of an old sink and across the surface of a wooden chopping board? But here it is, and here I am. In my zeal to be a part of a grand adventure, I traded my mother's kitchen for this one." Sister

For what I did, I cannot atone. I can only suffer.

I'll look out for him," Keller said. Because he needs to. Call it penance, call it atonement or whatever the hell you want, he only knows that he needs to do it, that he can only find redemption by helping this boy find his, by showing love to what he hates, that at the end of the day or the end of the world, there are no separate souls. We will go to heaven or we will go to hell, but we will go together.

In the cosmology of Western Christians, life's challenges provide opportunities to become stronger and to have a closer relationship with God. The burdens God sends to Christians in the Western world are incitements to self-improvement. The comforts that Amina found in her religious belief, by contrast, were not in an encouragement to overcome or learn from hardships. Rather, simply accepting her burdens was a continuous act of penance.

You'll pass through fire, which burns, but also purges. And you'll do it alone. For were someone to support you in this, help you, take on even a scrap of that baptism of fire, that pain, that penance, they would, by the same token, impoverish you. They would deprive you of part of the expiation you desire, which would be owed to them for their involvement.

I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you.

Maintaining equanimity in misery is called penance (tapa).

Once, when I was grumbling over being obliged to eat meat and do no penance, I heard it said that sometimes there was more of self-love than desire of penance in such sorrow. St. Teresa

I, too, wanted to do penance for my own sins and for the sins of the whole world, for I had a keen sense of sin, of natural imperfection and earthliness.

Golf is not a game, it's bondage. It was obviously devised by a man torn with guilt, eager to atone for his sins.

Penance is one way in which we willingly embrace this discipline in order to learn from it, just as a godly child may embrace his parent's discipline.

The torments of his mind and the severe penance he had observed, had produced a surprising change in his appearance, so that he resembled a spectre rather than a human being. His visage was wan and wasted, his eyes were sunk and become nearly motionless, and his whole air and attitudes exhibited the wild energy of something — not of this earth.

She HATED to think about her sins.

This is me, a sinner on whom the Lord has turned his gaze. And this is what I said when they asked me if I would accept my election as pontiff. I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and I accept in a spirit of penance.

Death is perhaps an ordeal, but it is not an expiation

I have not met any enjoyment I have not had to expiate one way or another.

wish I was Catholic. The spurious thought made her smile. Catholicism did seem to have her problem covered. She could simply walk into a confessional booth, shock a priest sworn to secrecy, do a little penance, and be done with it.

Purgatory fire will be more intolerable than all the torments that can be felt or conceived in this life.