Absolution Quotes

“There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“I find something repulsive about the idea of vicarious redemption. I would not throw my numberless sins onto a scapegoat and expect them to pass from me; we rightly sneer at the barbaric societies that practice this unpleasantness in its literal form. There's no moral value in the vicarious gesture anyway. As Thomas Paine pointed out, you may if you wish take on a another man's debt, or even to take his place in prison. That would be self-sacrificing. But you may not assume his actual crimes as if they were your own; for one thing you did not commit them and might have died rather than do so; for another this impossible action would rob him of individual responsibility. So the whole apparatus of absolution and forgiveness strikes me as positively immoral, while the concept of revealed truth degrades the concept of free intelligence by purportedly relieving us of the hard task of working out the ethical principles for ourselves.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

“Redemption was asking too much, but he could hope. Something told him he’d still be seeking absolution when he took his last breath on some distant day.”
― Kelly Moran, In deinen Armen

“Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death.”
― Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective

“More than any of us, she had written her own story; yet she could not wash it out with all her tears, return to her victims what she had torn from them, and by so doing, save herself...”
― Sandra Worth, Lady of the Roses: A Novel of the Wars of the Roses

“It would kill the past, and when that was dead, he would be free.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“I don't want to be loved despite my history:
I want absolution, someone to observe my fitting-into and
growing-out-of, someone to watch my spine
make the mannequin come to life.”
― Lisa Marie Basile, APOCRYPHAL

“How can one absolve intelligent men for engaging in arrogant and demented folly?”
― C R Strahan

“Absolution – yes, I grasp the notion, but absolution is not the same as redemption, is it? The former is passive. The latter demands an effort, one with implicit sacrifice and hardship, one demanding all the higher qualities of what we call virtues.”
― Steven Erikson, Toll the Hounds

“I understand why sin eaters were made. Carrying such feelings is too much for one little heart, too much for one body. There must be some hope of shedding regret, grief, sorrow, sloughing them off like a skin and going into death free and light. Else we'd never be able to live.”
― Megan Campisi, Sin Eater

“We teach best by how we live life; who we are instructs with absolute clarity.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“There's a price for absolution on this planet, and it's called penance.”
― Spider Robinson, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

“So what actually goes on with all this religion business? Does it really matter whether you’re a Gnostic, a Christian, a Muslim, a Shi’ite, a Hindu, a Taoist, a Rosicrucian, a Jew, a Witch or a Jehovah’s Witness? Not in the slightest. (Well, it might matter if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness). Does it matter if you follow the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Ramakrishna or Mary Baker Eddy? Of course not. Does it matter if your ritual object or talisman is a cup, an amulet, a tabernacle, a horseshoe, holy water, a wishbone, a Sanctus bell, a St. Christopher, a baptismal font, a rabbit’s foot, rosary beads, a broomstick or a seven-branched candlestick? No, it’s just something to focus your mind on. The real power is within you.

Just as long as it doesn’t become a cop-out. Which it so often does. Why? I’ll tell you. Because Rag, Tag & Bobtail are not willing to take responsibility for their own lives. They need someone to tell them what to do and what to believe. But in reality you don’t need anyone. It’s all there inside you. You grant your own absolution. Hey, it’s your life! You certainly have more control over your ultimate destiny than a priest.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Guilt is not an intrinsically helpful emotion for future decision-making. And often the spiral of guilt and shame can lead criminals to remain criminals.
This idea was so intriguing to me, for personal reasons that should arlready be clear, that I later took it on for my undergraduate senior thesis. My paper, which I turned in six weeks early and for which I received an A, was titled "Remorse and Absolution: Peas in a Pod or Dangerous Bunkmates?”
― Sascha Rothchild, Blood Sugar

“desperate times offered a certain flexibility in the rules of absolution.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“Be free, and fare thou well!”
― William Shakespeare, The Tempest

“At that point, Frank seemed to run out of words. There was somebody that he'd reminded me of, as he was spinning out his story and struggling to explain himself. Then I realized: it was myself...when I had desperately tried to talk my way out of something that could never be put right. He was doing the same thing I had done. He was trying to talk his way into absolution. In that moment, I felt overcome by a sense of mercy...for that younger version of myself...Then my mercy swelled, and for just a moment I felt mercy for everyone who has ever gotten involved in an impossibly messy story. All those predicaments that we humans find ourselves in - predicaments that we never see coming, do not know how to handle, and then cannot fix.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

“It seems to me that although they have a respectable sales pitch, this business of a priest having the power to let bygones be bygones and grant us absolution from our scandals is all just one gigantic scam to con loads of money off a haunted and gullible public.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Look at the snow, the woman was saying to the child. The snow absolves Vienna of its sins. The snow falls on Vienna while the missiles rain on Tel Aviv.”
― Daniel Silva, The Secret Servant

“The hand that pockets the corrupt coin places it in the collection plate seeking absolution.”
― Stewart Stafford

“You men that be known from these others by your Christian profession. Take heed, you bear in mind the piety you owe unto your country and unto your fellow countrymen, whose slaughter by the treachery of the Payneham shall be unto your disgrace everlasting. Unless you press hardily forward to defend them. Fight therefore for your country, and if it be that death overtake you, suffer it willingly for your country’s sake. For death itself is victory, and a healing unto the soul. In as much as he that shall have died for his brethren offers himself as a living sacrifice unto God, nor is it doubtful that herein he follows in the footsteps of Christ, who distained not to lay down his own soul for his breatharian. Who therefore amongst you shall be slain in this battle, unto him shall that death be as full penance and absolution of all his sins, if so be he receive it willingly on this way.”
― Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain

“Apostasy implies an absolute damnation only on the supposition of a previous perfect faith. Does that fix it?”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, Babylon Revisited and Other Stories

“An overemphasis on teamwork and consensus can cause a kind of mental lethargy. If you subordinate your own expectations to the expectations of the group, you’re absolved of the responsibilities for the choices the group makes.”
― Vincent H. O'Neil, A Pause in the Perpetual Rotation

“...confession is believed to reveal the deep truths of who people are (...) Michel Foucault once wrote that we live in a "confessional society." (...) But confessions were not originally about fact-finding, nor were they meant to entertain. Confession began as a search for absolution.”
― Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

“Heaven entails hell, and ‘going to heaven’ is no more liberation than is the descent into horror. Heaven is merely a vantage point from which the divine Ground can be more clearly seen than on the level of ordinary individualized existence.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception & Heaven and Hell

“Omul este fiinta care aspira catre Arta prin vis. Unica si ultima lui implinire este aceea de a i se permite sa traiasca in launtrul propriului sau vis. (...) Insa exista si foarte multi oameni care nu-si pot gasi pacea niciodata. Visul lor personal este tulbure, plin de teroare, de resentiment fata de ceilalti ori fata de ei insisi. A-i face sa traiasca intr-o asemenea realitate ar echivala, pentru ei, cu o condamnare la pedepsele infernului. Un infern pe care fiecare il duce cu sine oriunde se invarte. Prin Arta, ei pot fi salvati de infern, dar nu vor cunoaste niciodata adevarul. De aceea trebuie lasati sa traiasca in interiorul lumii. Lumea insasi a fost intotdeauna si a ramas o fictiune a Artei, aparuta ca sa-i salveze intr-un fel pe condamnatii la infernul personal. Din cand in cand, prin moarte, acestia se recufunda in ei insisi, iar Arta, rabdatoare, ii aduce inapoi.”
― Ioan Petru Culianu, Hesperus

“I was tempted to tell the whole truth. But in moments when a confession was about to seep out, I stopped myself, because I knew it would never work like that. Admitting to killing the other three would only make the case that I killed Jason even stronger. So there was no point in trying to make that imaginary bargain with the world. Please, punish me for what I have done. And believe I did not do the thing you think I did. It was not an option.”
― Sascha Rothchild, Blood Sugar

“Melinda's trick is looking hard in the mirror,
Absolving herself and cracking open doors to the next place.

But the girl at that school, so haunted,
smashed all the reflections
boarded up the windows and
bolted the doors,
forever stuck at 15 years old
judged to serve a life sentence for what they did.”
― Laurie Halse Anderson, Shout