Confession is an act of honesty and courage - an act of entrusting ourselves, beyond sin, to the mercy of a loving and forgiving God. — Pope John Paul II
A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. — Albert Camus
Confession of errors is like a broom which sweeps away the dirt and leaves the surface brighter and clearer. I feel stronger for confession. — Mahatma Gandhi
Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it. — Charles M. Blow
Confession is like a bridle that keeps the soul which reflects on it from committing sin, but anything left unconfessed we continue to do without fear as if in the dark. — John Climacus
Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin, all hope consists in confession; in confession there is a chance for mercy. — Isidore of Seville
Some there are who are much more ashamed of confessing a sin than of committing it. — Marguerite de Navarre
If you excuse yourself in confession, you shut up sin within your soul, and
shut out pardon. — Saint Augustine
Short Confessional Quotes
It takes, unhappily, no more than a desk and writing supplies to turn any room into a confessional. — Thomas Pynchon
Look at it this way - a totem pole is just a decorated tree. My work is a confessional. — Louise Bourgeois
Many of us are confessional giants but ethical midgets. — Mark Buchanan
Overheard in a Washington D.C. church confessional: "Bless me Father, for sins have been committed." — Robert Breault
My writing is remarkably non-confessional; you actually learn very little about me. — Michael Pollan
If you go back to all my albums, they're all confessional. — Yoko Ono
"Confessional poetry" is another one of those labels. It goes in and out of fashion. — Matthea Harvey
I didn't really like confessional poetry or things. They seemed sort of dated to me, or just corny. — Stephen Malkmus
The work that's interesting to me in other people is really confessional. — Lena Dunham
The way I work, I'm not a confessional singer-songwriter. — Andrew Bird
Confessional Image Quotes
First Confession Quotes
The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works. — Saint Augustine
Whoever hates his sins will stop sinning; and whoever confesses them will receive remission. A man can not abandon the habit of sin if he does not first gain enmity toward sin, nor can he receive remission of sin without confession of sin. For the confession of sin is the cause of true humility. — Isaac of Nineveh
It must be confessed that it takes considerable skill to produce the best kind of lies. It is in the hands of first-class photographers only - and perhaps the indifferent ones - that photography can lie. — Henry Peach Robinson
Order is Heaven's first law; and this confess, Some are and must be greater than the rest. — Alexander Pope
I confess that when I first read that smog is particularly hazardous to children, senior citizens, and physically active people, for a brief moment I thought, “I’m in the clear for at least 10 more years.” — Paula Poundstone
Order is Heaven's first law; and this confessed, some are, and must be, greater than the rest, more rich, more wise; but who infers from hence that such are happier, shocks all common sense. Condition, circumstance, is not the thing; bliss is the same in subject or in king. — Alexander Pope
I have to confess that a strong contributing factor was that I had just taken what was probably the first acid ever made, given to me by a guy called Johnny Fellows, who had just returned from America. — Jim Capaldi
It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on. — Mark Twain
That each from other differs, first confess; next that he varies from himself no less. — Alexander Pope
Do not first announce action, and then, when you are unable to take action, withdraw, because you will only find yourself in the same position as now, plus a public and humiliating confession of impotence. — Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery
Confession Quotes
Our confession will either imprison us or set us free. Our confession is the result of our believing, and our believing is the result of our right or wrong thinking. — Kenneth E. Hagin
People do not seem to realize that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
We, at least, are not loyal men: we confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland today than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England. — James Connolly
Ask Jesus to make you a saint. After all, only He can do that. Go to confession regularly and to Communion as often as you can — Dominic Savio
There is a spiritual side to me that goes real deep, but I confess right up front that I'm the biggest sinner of them all. — Johnny Cash
I cannot tell the truth about anything unless I confess being a student, growing and learning something new every day. The more I learn, the clearer my view of the world becomes. — Sonia Sanchez
There is more freedom confessing our weaknesses and shortcomings than in pretending we have it all together — LeCrae
In the life of the body a man is sometimes sick, and unless he takes medicine, he will die. Even so in the spiritual life a man is sick on account of sin. For that reason he needs medicine so that he may be restored to health; and this grace is bestowed in the Sacrament of Penance. — Thomas Aquinas
We talk religion in a world that worships the bread but does not distribute it, that practices ritual rather than righteousness, that confesses but does not repent. — Joan D. Chittister
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart. — Saint Jerome
Secret Confessions Quotes
Silence is full of the unspoken, of deeds undone, of confessions to secret love, and of wonders not expressed. Our truth is hidden in our silence, Yours and I. — Ahmad Shamloo
Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence. — Dorothy Dix
There cannot be a secret Christian. Grace is like ointment hid in the hand; it betrayeth itself. If you truly feel the sweetness of the cross of Christ, you will be constrained to confess Christ before men. — Robert Murray M'Cheyne
I try to keep my sitters moving and talking, to make them forget they are being painted. This has nothing to do with extracting intimate secrets or confessions, but rather with establishing, in motion, an essential image of the kind that remains in memory or recurs in dreams. — Oskar Kokoschka
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time. — Karl Marx
I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold. — Erik Larson
Self-Criticism is the secret weapon of democracy, and candor and confession are good for the political soul. — Adlai Stevenson I
The mere idea of marriage, as a strong possibility, if not always nowadays a reasonable likelihood, existing to weaken the will by distracting its straight aim in the life of practically every young girl, is the simple secret of their confessed inferiority in men's pursuits and professions to-day. — William Bolitho
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept. — Jean Cocteau
If each of us were to confess his most secret desire, the one that inspires all his plans, all his actions, he would say: "I want to be praised." — Emile M. Cioran
All of our punishment institutions, including jails, laws, church confessionals, and so forth, are systems of illusion. The order of the universe, the infinite justice of yin and yang, naturally takes care of all motion and compensation. We don't need to invent arbitrary ways to make balance with punishments. — Michio Kushi
I've always written songs that were confessional, acoustic, wordy - my writing style matches my personality. The music always has to match the mouth it comes out of. — Camila Cabello
Don't confuse simple, reasonable honesty with radical silliness. There is no reason to try to articulate blurry feelings or over-explain every detail. The point is to be honest instead of internalizing, not to try to extract juicy confessionals out of everyday life. — Ann Burton
They say of us that we are an anti-Christian movement. They even say that I am an outspoken paganist.... I solemnly declare here, before the German public, that I stand on the basis of Christianity, but I declare just as solemnly that I will put down every attempt to introduce confessional matters into our Hitler Youth. — Baldur von Schirach
Emo: e-mo 1. A much-maligned, mocked, and misunderstood term for melodic, expressive, and confessional punk rock. — Andy Greenwald
Apostasy occurs when a church leaves its historic moorings, abandons its historic confessional position, and degenerates into a state where either essential Christian truths are blatantly denied or the denial of such truths is widely tolerated. — R. C. Sproul
Illness is a part of every human being's experience. It enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness. It is the great confessional; things are said, truths are blurted out which health conceals. — Virginia Woolf
No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? — C. Day Lewis
The confessional is not a torture chamber, but the place in which the Lord's mercy motivates us to do better. — Pope Francis
A fitting room to me has always been like a confessional ... where my body and my contrition take up the entire room. — Erma Bombeck
A confessional passage has probably never been written that didn't stink a little bit of the writer's pride in having given up his pride. — J. D. Salinger
They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think. — Ellis Peters
I was never trying to be funny. Being funny feels to me like an alternate form of confessionality - that is, a way of dismantling the distance between writer and reader, a way of saying, "come in a little closer." — Dan Chiasson
Augustine, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are confessional writers and all three make me sick. I have nothing in common with them. — Joni Mitchell
I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find. — Anne Lamott
At the time I was growing up, literature was involved with the so-called confessional poets. And I was not interested in that. I did not think that specific and personal perspective functioned well for the reader at all. — Mary Oliver
For me, 'risky' is revealing what really happened in my life through music. Risky is writing confessional songs and telling the true story about a person with enough details so everyone knows who that person is. — Taylor Swift
My experience with songwriting is usually so confessional, it's so drawn from my own life and my own stories. — Taylor Swift
I think that the moment we're living in offers the best opportunity we've had in a long time in that a lot of things having to do with identity politics are being talked about in poems. The only problem there is that a lot of the time these are being talked about in confessional modes. — Shane McCrae
I think that the casual reader and the lyric and confession are trickily tied up together. I mean often when I read my students' poems my first impulse is to say, "O, the subject of this pronoun, this 'I,' is whatever kid wrote this poem." The audience for lyric poems is "confessionalized" to some extent. And I think this audience tends to find long narrative poems, for instance, kind of bewildering. — Shane McCrae
People get anxious about dividing sorts of poetry, say Confessionalism from political poetry. But Confessionalism is very much an expression of racial privilege and of class privilege. I don't think it's always a blind expression of these privileges but it does have its genesis in them, in the politics of them. — Shane McCrae
Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers. — Shane McCrae
There's nothing confessional about crafting and shaping a story out of a lived life. In fact, it's quite the opposite - the writer has to be able to transcend the life, to see it as if standing outside of it, in order to be able to make something of it. There's something enormously satisfying and gratifying about crafting something, taking all that chaos and giving it shape. — Dani Shapiro
In the end, you do need institutions to transmit the faith for the long haul. That's why I make the case that, in certain ways, American Protestants could stand to recover the denominationalism that they've left behind over the last 50 years. They are real values in having a confessional tradition that can sustain your faith over the long term. — Ross Douthat
The book [Saving Calvinism] itself is not recommending that we move the borders, so to speak. It is recommending that we look at what lies within the confessional bounds of Reformed thought. — Oliver D. Crisp
Reformed theology belongs to this confessional tradition, and Reformed theologians and churches continue to write confessions even today. — Oliver D. Crisp
The confessional singer-songwriter movement of the 1970s was in full swing, and Bob Dylan's emotional album [ Blood on the Tracks] resonated with the times. There would be other hits, but never the same alchemy of emotion and time. — Bob Dylan
People "confess" can be wildly different. I might go into the confessional and say, "Father, what is my obsession with miniatures?" — Matthea Harvey
Some of my favorite poems are "confessional" poems written in the voices of aliens ("Southbound on the Freeway" by May Swenson" and "Report from the Surface" by Anthony McCann), sheep ("Snow Line" by John Berryman) or a yak ("The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia" by Oni Buchanan). — Matthea Harvey
As a reader I don't distinguish between confessional and non-confessional work. After all, how do we even know that certain "I" poems are confessional? It's a tricky business, this correlating of the speaker and the poet. — Matthea Harvey
I have no idea, actually, where I fit in, in terms of poetry camps. At AWP conferences, I have been on panels about humor, collaboration, visual poetry, confessional poetry, gender, and the body, as well as tributes to Edward Field and Albert Goldbarth. I felt at home on all of them - most poets straddle more than one school. — Denise Duhamel
I just can't fathom tweeting, and I'd rather spend my time writing a book than a blog, but I rather grudgingly agreed to a Facebook page. I had a brief, intense romance with Facebook. It's weirdly addictive, but anything that time-sucking is a danger for a writer who writes as slowly as I do. Now I post only occasionally and nothing very confessional. I think I'm carbon dating myself as I speak. — Debra Dean
One of the problems with a lot of "confessional" writing is that it starts and stops with the confessional and doesn't really tie the "I" into a "we" at all. I'm still surprised at how mad critics get at that kind of confessional writing. — Kiese Laymon
I'm interested in how the confessional is so abrasively critiqued today. I'm not really comfortable with simply confessing but I do think "confessing" is a major part of reckoning. — Kiese Laymon
A blog is neither a diary nor a journal. Many people think of blogging in relation to those two things, confessional or practical. It is neither but includes elements of both. — Lemn Sissay
'Nashville' songs and country music have always been about storytelling and about the heart and confessionals. They're monologues. — Chip Esten
Stick me in a confessional and ask the question: Sir, if you had the authority, would you forbid smoking in America? You'd get a solemn and contrite, Yes. — William F. Buckley, Jr.
In Conclusion
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