1. Top Famous Quotes
    2. /
  2. Penance Quotes

Top Penance Quotes

Browse top 54 famous quotes and sayings about Penance by most favorite authors.

Favorite Penance Quotes

1. "However powerful our technology and complex our corporations, the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy. All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first to suggest that it could be something more than a punishment or a penance. Ours is the first to imply that we should seek to work even in the absence of a financial imperative."
Author: Alain De Botton
2. "Is there such a thing as a life without any regrets? I've never believed so. We spend our lives aiming for happiness and fulfilment in work, in love and with our friends and family, and yet often our energy is spent lamenting bad boyfriends, wrong career turns, fallouts with friends and opportunities missed. Or is that just me? I admit I'm naturally a glass-half-empty kind of girl, but I know regrets are a burden to happiness and I'm trying to let go of them because I've learned that it's all about choice. You can choose to turn regrets into lessons that change your future. Believe me when I say I'm really trying to do this. But the truth is, I'm failing. Because all I can think right now is: maybe I deserve it. Maybe this is my penance."
Author: Ali Harris
3. "A husband or wife did not have the right either to demand sex from his or her spouse or to refuse it, and there was a catalogue of forbidden sexual practices, notably homosexuality, bestiality, certain sexual positions, masturbation, the use of aphrodisiacs, and oral sex, which could incur a penance of three years' duration. Nor were people to make love on Sundays, holy days, or feast days, or during Lent, pregnancy, or menstruation. People believed that if these rules were disobeyed, deformed children or lepers might result."
Author: Alison Weir
4. "Chaos is the penance for leisure."
Author: Amy Tan
5. "It was then that 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. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world's tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. I would give my entire output of words, past, present and to come, in exchange for easier access to the world, for permission to state "I hurt" or " I hate" or " I want". Or indeed, "Look at me". And I do not go back on this. For once a thing is known it can never be unknown. It can only be forgotten. And writing is the enemy of forgetfulness, or thoughtlessness. For the writer there is no oblivion. Only endless memory."
Author: Anita Brookner
6. "There were times that Nathan felt the world would be better off if he were dead. It seemed to him that it would be penance for his sins."
Author: Belinda G. Buchanan
7. "Breeze chuckled. "He was completely insane, you know. The worse things got, the more he'd joke. Iremember how chipper he was the very day after one of our worst defeats, when we lost most of ourskaa army to that fool Yeden. Kell walked in, a spring in his step, making one of his inane jokes.""Sounds insensitive," Allrianne said.Ham shook his head. "No. He was just determined. He always said that laughter was something theLord Ruler couldn't take from him. He planned and executed the overthrow of a thousand-yearempire—and he did it as a kind of . . . penance for letting his wife die thinking that he hated her. But, hedid it all with a smirk on his lips. Like every joke was his way of slapping fate in the face.""We need what he had," Elend said."
Author: Brandon Sanderson
8. "Repentance grows as faith grows. Do not make any mistake about it; repentance is not a thing of days and weeks, a temporary penance to be got over as fast as possible! No; it is the grace of a lifetime, like faith itself. God's little children repent, and so do the young men and the fathers. Repentance is the inseparable companion of faith."
Author: Charles H. Spurgeon
9. "[Jesus] tilted His head back, pulled up one last time to draw breath and cried, "Tetelestai!" It was a Greek expression most everyone present would have understood. It was an accounting term. Archaeologists have found papyrus tax receipts with "Tetelestai" written across them, meaning "paid in full." With Jesus' last breath on the cross, He declared the debt of sin cancelled, completely satisfied. Nothing else required. Not good deeds. Not generous donations. Not penance or confession or baptism or...or...or...nothing. The penalty for sin is death, and we were all born hopelessly in debt. He paid our debt in full by giving His life so that we might live forever."
Author: Charles R. Swindoll
10. "Duty o'er love was the choice you did make My love you did spurn, my heart you did break Your penance to pay, no pride you shall gain Three sons on three sons find nothing but pain I gift you my powers in memory of me The joy of love no son shall ever seeWhen a Lifemate is chosen by the heart of a son No protection can be given, again I have won His pain will be deep, her death will be swift Inside his heart a terrible riftOnly freely given will this curse be done To break the spell, three must work as one."
Author: Cherry Adair
11. "Celibacy,fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues...Stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper...A gloomy hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar, but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delerious and dismal as himself."
Author: David Hume
12. "Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions."
Author: Dean Koontz
13. "For your penance, say two Hail Marys, three our Fathers, and," he added, with a chuckle, "say a special prayer for the Dodgers."
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin
14. "When you've tired of me," she said softly, precisely, "Apollo will still be my brother. Will still be there for me.""I'll never tire of you," he said, knowing with every thread of his soul that he spoke the absolute truth."Then prove it."He knew what she asked with such an open and vulnerable face. Something within him shriveled and died... he'd been on the rack too long for a penance he wasn't sure he could ever entirely pay. "You know…" His voice was hoarse, the croaking of a dying man. He licked his lips. "You know why I cannot."
Author: Elizabeth Hoyt
15. "I hope I am not for the killing, Anselmo was thinking. I think that after the war there will have to be some great penance done for the killing. If we no longer have religion after the war then I think there must be some form of civic penance organized that all may be cleansed from the killing or else we will never have a true and human basis for living. The killing is necessary, I know, but still the doing of it is very bad for a man and I think that, after all this is over and we have won the war, there must be a penance of some kind for the cleansing of us all."
Author: Ernest Hemingway
16. "Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles."
Author: Freya Stark
17. "I have traveled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways."
Author: Henry David Thoreau
18. "So crosses don't do anything against your kind?" Sean asked."No," Arland said. "There is no mystical force repelling us.""Then why?""We're forbidden to kill a creature in a moment of prayer or invocation of their deity. Well, we can, technically, but you have to do penance and purify yourself and nobody wants to spend weeks praying and bathing themselves in the sacred cave springs. The water's only a fraction warmer than ice. When one of you holds up a cross, it's difficult to determine whether you're praying, invoking, or just waving it around. So the sane strategy is to back away."
Author: Ilona Andrews
19. "...I had grown accustomed to life being interesting and adventure ridden and, rather childishly, I refused to believe that this must necessarily come to an end and that the rest of my life should be a sort of penance for all the reckless, irresponsible, and immensely fun things I'd done before."
Author: J. Maarten Troost
20. "Today a celebrity sex video isn't a stigma that requires penance and smarm removal; it's a branding device, a platform enhancer, a show reel."
Author: James Wolcott
21. "Everyone has a need to do penance. It's a basic need, like washing. It's about harmony, an absolutely essential inner balance. It's the balance we call morality."
Author: Jo Nesbø
22. "It would be one kind of penance. And there are never enough kinds. Not for him. Not for me. And certainly not for you, my friend."
Author: John D. MacDonald
23. "Novels were not arguments; a story worked, or it didn't, on its own merits. What did it matter if a detail was real or imagined? What mattered was that the detail seemed real, and that it was absolutely the best detail for the circumstance. That wasn't much of a theory, but it was all Ruth could truly commit herself to at the moment. It was time to retire that old lecture, and her penance was to endure the compliments of her former credo."
Author: John Irving
24. "So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self."
Author: John Keats
25. "Five years with the dowager - Good God, she ought to be given a title in her own right as a penance for such as that. No one had done more for England."
Author: Julia Quinn
26. "I know California isn't a real destination. You can't get there from New Jersey, not simply by following a line drawn on a map. The process of arrival is more subtle and complex. It involves acts of contrition. You must appease the gods. You must find novel forms of penance. You must tattoo your children and look at the wonder. It's about conjuring and awakening and intuitions you wish you never had."
Author: Kate Braverman
27. "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."
Author: Kim Edwards
28. "We kissed each other until we were too tired to keep going. I could still feel him holding back. It was my penance for what I had done to him. All I could do was hope the walls would fall and that I could have all of him again, but I was always leaving and he was tired of watching me walk away. We both knew that I couldn't stay and that he couldn't come with me, but still, we couldn't let go."
Author: Kimberly Novosel
29. "When it was over, she gathered him in her arms. And told him the terrible irony of her life.That she had wanted to be dead all those years while her brother had been alive. That had been her sin.And this was her penance.Wanting to live when everyone else seemed dead."
Author: Melina Marchetta
30. "On the hill opposite, Joachim tolled the midday bell, announcing lunch to the workers in the fields. Klaus listened a moment, then said, "I thought it would be a bleaker scene."Dietrich turned to him, "What would be?""This day. I thought it would be marked by terrible signs - lowering clouds, ominous winds, a crack of thunder. Twilight. Yet, it is so ordinary a morning that I grow frightened.""Only now frightened.""Ja. Portents would mean a Divine Mover, however mysterious His moves; and the wrath of an angry God may be turned away by prayer and penance. But it simply happened. Everard grew sick and fell down. There were no signs; so it may be a natural thing, as you have always said. And against nature, we have no recourse."
Author: Michael Flynn
31. "'Dirty Jobs' is a fun, simple little show with huge themes under it. For me, it's penance, it's redemption, it's a sweaty mess."
Author: Mike Rowe
32. "The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy."
Author: Mother Teresa
33. "No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure"
Author: Murasaki Shikibu
34. "A tearing thrusts this vacant heart Brutal agony does prevail. Incessantly battling for Victory's love, Its resolute intents to no avail . . . But this singular army will not retreat, It is obligated by penance- Ravenous for Her emotional defeat."
Author: Nely Cab
35. "Often what keeps us stuck and continually doing penance is the very feeling that we must pay for lack of action. We become caught in a circle of blame, condemn ourselves, feel hopeless, and feed the fire—or slow burn—by reciting like a mantra our history of inertia and self-judged wrong choices. Well, let's break that dead-end cycle of waste and regret."
Author: Noelle Sterne
36. "Goodwill to Spazzy up in gerbil heaven. Sorry sorry sorry. I stopped eating meat the day of the massacre, as penance for Spazzy. I've been a vegetarian since age six, all for the love of a gerbil."
Author: Rachel Cohn
37. "He stood and he only had one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine-log he was carrying along as a penance for some obscure sin."
Author: Ray Bradbury
38. "Nature has made a mistake in the choice of my sexuality and I must do a life-long penance for it, for the moral power to suffer the unavoidable with dignity is lost."
Author: Richard Von Krafft Ebing
39. "He who confesses magic or sorcery shall do penance for the time of murder, and shall be treated in the same manner as he who convicts himself of this sin."
Author: Saint Basil
40. "The safest and most suitable form of penance seems to be that which causes pain in the flesh but does not penetrate to the bones, that is, which causes suffering but not sickness."
Author: Saint Ignatius
41. "Told often enough that they are the source of sin, women may well begin feeling guilty as they accept the necessity for penance. Taught effectively enough that they are irrelevant to the important processes of society, women begin to feel they are living invisibly."
Author: Sandra M. Gilbert Susan Gubar
42. "For long after guilty memories fade, the urge for penance lingers: strong and blind as the will to drink rain and grope for sunlight."
Author: Sean Stewart
43. "Philosophy calls for simple living, not for doing penance, and the simple way of life need not be a crude one."
Author: Seneca
44. "I recalled the afternoon when the two of us stood beating erasers, and Camille confided that she'd done penance for stories - stories that I'll never know if she wrote or only imagined writing. She'd wanted me to tell her a secret from my dreams, a secret from my dreams I hadn't had as yet, and so I didn't quite understand what she was after."It's about feeling," Camille had insisted.I didn't understand then that she was talking about risk."
Author: Stuart Dybek
45. "Three cheeses isn't a choice, it's a penance."
Author: Terry Pratchett
46. "And there it was. The prim face of censure he'd been seeking. A strange sense of satisfaction descended on him. Divine justice, perhaps. Other men, better men, confessed their sins to priests and saints, but Gray had chosen for his confessor this governess. The most beautiful woman he'd ever set eyes on, in all his years of chasing pleasure from one horizon to the next. The only woman to stir this desperate yearning in his breast. And this was his penance-to watch her shrink back into her chair, to see those clear eyes glaze with mistrust as she at last recognized him for the devil he was.Yes, this was his due. And she wasn't finished yet, his petite, austere inquisitor."
Author: Tessa Dare
47. "The vast world rainless, one may bid adieuTo charity and penance."
Author: Thiruvalluvar
48. "I will no longer wound myself with the thoughts and questions that have surrounded me like thorns: that is a penance You do not ask of me."
Author: Thomas Merton
49. "But now seeing that great knowledge, while good, had not saved the world, he turned in penance to the Lord, crying."
Author: Walter Miller
50. "There weren't any promises of a future life together, either, but he didn't need to live like a monk anymore. Two years was more than enough time for soul-searching and penance. As long as Laney was close enough to touch, to breath in, to taste like his goddamn last meal, he would take whatever she offered and not ask any questions about what it might cost him when she inevitably left."
Author: Zoe York
First«12»Last

Penance Quotes Pictures

Quotes About Penance
Quotes About Penance
Quotes About Penance

Today's Quote

Mataron a Federico cuando la luz asomaba. / El pelotón de verdugos no osó mirarle la casra. / Todos cerraron los ojos; / rezaron: ¡ni Dios te salva! / Muerto cayó Federico / -sangre en la frente y plomo en las entrañas- / Que fue en Granada el crimen / sabed -¡pobre Granada-, en su Granada"
Author: Antonio Machado

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Copyright © 2023 Top Famous Quotes. All Rights Reserved. | New Quotes | Topic List | Author List | Privacy Policy | About Us | Contact Us |