Remorse

“ The wild despair of remorse is giving way to the self-renunciation of repentance; the storm of conflicting passions and emotions is stilled; the fearful battle between good and evil through which he has passed has left him exhausted of every hope and aim save to die, repentant and absolved, for the country and faith he had abjured. ”

“ Though remorse sits close beside it,
⁠And the heart repentant breaks.
Serve and wait, for when beyond us
⁠Lives float off to yonder shore,
Never word or loving service
⁠Can we render evermore. ”

“ I am doomed to never-ceasing horror and remorse! If misery can atone for such enormous guilt, I have felt it in the extreme. Like an undying vulture it preys upon my heart;--to sorrow I am wedded; I hug that teeming consort to my soul;--never, ah! never shall we part; for soon as my fame shall shine unclouded by the charge of treason that now hangs over it, I will devote myself to penitence and woe. ”

“ Of vengeance that follows, remorse that stings
Messmates remember though crime is done,
In the lonest spot beneath the sun,
Where footstep of man has never trod,
It's under the eye of an avenging God. ”

“ To tell you all in a few words, my dear master, though once more I say that I did not kill Mlle. de Jussat, I have been connected in the closest manner with the drama of her poisoning, and I feel remorse, although the doctrines in which I believe, the truths which I know, and the convictions which form the essence of my intellect, make me consider remorse the most silly of human illusions. ”

“ And all this while to whom had his complaints been uttered?—to the man who knew that his remorse was an idle spectre and his faithful sorrow a mocking self-deceit. Every thought that could gall man’s natural pride, every remembrance that could sting into revenge a heart that had loved too deeply not to be accessible to hate, conspired to goad those maddening Furies who come into every temple which is once desecrated by the presence of the evil passions. ”

“ It is your remorse that has driven you to make so many attempts against the only living souls who knew and understood. If ever we get safely to land once more—and God knows it is not likely—I give you still the chance of repairing the mischief you have done, and of clearing my father's memory from the cruel stain which you and only you can wipe away. ”

“ I do not think it; for true and reasonable remorse for crimes really committed cannot approach it. Not all the sins that man ever laid upon his soul could equal in atrocity what my guilt seemed to me. ”

“ But it is in vain, that I torment myself with endeavouring to extinguish the remorse I feel in attempting to induce the sacred laws, the monument of publick confidence, the foundation of human morality, to authorise dissimulation and perfidy. ”

“ Shall they only bring remorse, or shall they bring repentance?
Remorse. In that is nothing but pain. A man may see all the wrong and folly he has done; he may fret over it, torment himself with it, curse himself for it, and yet be the worse, and not the better, for what he sees. If he be a strong-minded man, he may escape from remorse in the bustle of business or pleasure. ”

“ To Heaven I leave the vindication of my innocence. Its justice is sure, though sometimes slow, and the hour of retribution often arrives when least expected. Much as I have suffered—much as I may still suffer, I think my own situation preferable to theirs who have set their snares around me. The injurer must ever feel greater pangs than the injured—the pangs of guilt and remorse. I shall return to my obscurity, happy in the consciousness that it is not a shelter from shame, but a refuge from cruelty I seek. ”

“ The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit - As my crimes are such as admit of no legal atonement, so thou hast reserved them to be punished by exemplary acts of justice, or to be pardoned by a sovereign act of mercy: but in order to find this mercy, thou requirest that the heart and soul should deeply feel the transgression, and turn to thee with the fullest compunction and remorse. ”

“ To the remorse in our own hearts, responds the shame in that second soul which we have made ourselves, and is called public opinion. We must not be astonished at the sweets of popularity. We are more sure of having done well, when to the testimony of our consciousness we are able to join that of the consciousness of our fellow-men. ”

“ And every pang of remorse is a premonition of God's judgment, and every sorrow and suffering which the Governor of the world has connected with sin—as the drunkard's loss of character and property, of peace and happiness, the frenzy of his soul, and the destruction of his body—is a type and teaching of the curse which he has denounced against sin. ”

“ The man he sacrificed to his ambition, that innocent victim he made pay the penalty of his father's faults, appeared to him pale and threatening, leading his affianced bride by the hand, and bringing with him remorse, not such as the ancients figured, furious and terrible, but that slow and consuming agony which, at times, strikes the heart and lacerates it with recollections of past deeds, — a laceration whose poignant pangs increase and deepen the evil till death comes. ”

“ Remorse contains the idea of good and evil, of an obligatory law, of liberty, of merit and demerit. All these ideas were already in the struggle between{280} good and evil; they reappear in remorse. In vain interest counselled me to appropriate the deposit that had been confided to me; something said to me, and still says to me, that to appropriate it is to do evil, is to commit an injustice; I judged, and judge, thus, not such a day, but always, not under such a circumstance, but under all circumstances. ”

“ instead of that serenity of conscience which allowed me to look back upon the past with self-satisfaction, and from thence to gather promise of new hopes, I was seized by remorse and the sense of guilt, which hurried me away to a hell of intense tortures such as no language can describe. ”

“ I reply, that remorse will always subsist as long as we shall be capable of feeling its pangs, even when we cease to fear the distant and uncertain vengeance of the Divinity. In the commission of crimes, in allowing one's self to be the sport of passion, in injuring our species, in refusing to do them good, in stifling pity, every man whose reason is not totally deranged perceives clearly that he will render himself odious to others, that he ought to fear their enmity. ”

“ He scarcely can, in fact, express what one of ourselves would feel, as there is no word for repentance in his vocabulary, except ‘good’; nor is there any word for sorrow, except ‘angry’ or ‘annoyed.’ The very sentiment of remorse is so unknown that there are no means of expressing it in any form. ”

“ Those confessions of indwelling sin that remorse will wring from us, and which perhaps are penned at the moment in perfect sincerity, being unaccompanied with, the specifications that would invest them in their naturally hideous colors, beneath the searching light of God's holy and spiritual law, wear the lovely garb of unfeigned humility. ”

“ The Latin word remorse, and the old English name for conscience, 'again-bite'—which latter is a translation of the other—teach us the same lesson, that the gnawing which comes after wrong done is far harder to bear than the touch that should have kept us from the evil. ”

“ That certain blunders hurt us more than our lesser crimes, and that our remorse for them is like our remorse for venial immorality, only more intense, is nowadays a matter of frequent remark. You ride using another man’s season-ticket, or you tell a white lie, or speak an unkind word, and conscience, if a little used to such things, never winces. ”

“ There cannot be imagined a better contrivance to deter us from vice; for remorse is the severest of all punishments. This passion and the desire of self-punishment derived from it, are touched delicately by Terence. ”

“ And the recollection of things like these is that agony which we call remorse. Many of us have remembrances of this kind which are fatal to serenity. We shut them out, but it will not do. They bide their time, and then suddenly present themselves, together with the thought of a judgment-seat. When a guilty man begins to think of dying, it is like a vision of the Son of Man presenting itself and calling out the voices of all the unclean spirits in the man—“Art thou come to torment us before the time?” ”

“ Let thy frequent remorses at last end in one effectual remorse. Let not pride and wantonness of heart ruin the fairer prospects. By my faith, Lovelace, there is nothing but vanity, conceit, and nonsense, in our wild schemes. As we grow older, we shall be wiser, and looking back upon our foolish notions of the present hour, (our youth dissipated,) shall certainly despise ourselves when we think of the honourable engagements we might have made: thou, more especially, if thou lettest such a matchless creature slide through thy fingers. ”

“ You have gone on for a long time in your nefarious course, unchecked by any consideration for those innocent beings against whom your evil practices have been directed, and undeterred either by the pangs of that remorse, which must at times have overshadowed even such a hardened soul as yours, or by the fear of that punishment which, though long deferred, was certain to arrive at last. ”

“ "remorse is the word for a child, or for a fool—the unpunished crime is never regretted. We weep over the consequence, not over the fault. ”

“ But if we banish from our minds all cases given in novels and plays and in death-bed confessions made to priests, I doubt whether many of us have actually witnessed remorse; though we may have often seen shame and contrition for smaller offences. ”

“ For my omniscience paid I toll
In infinite remorse of soul.
All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.
And all the while for every grief,
Each suffering, I craved relief
With individual desire,—
Craved all in vain! And felt fierce fire
About a thousand people crawl;
Perished with each,—then mourned for all! ”

“ If I, born a bloodthirsty and savage brute, inheriting these qualities from others, kill you, my fellow-men will very justly hang me, but I shall not be visited with the horrible remorse which would be my real punishment if, my nature being higher, I had done the same thing. ”

“ The criminal trembling at the bar of an earthly tribunal, and with remorse and repentance receiving his doom, might, in like manner, be wholly unable to set his emotions to the measures of speech; but when recovered from the shock by pardon, or reprieve, or submission, is there any reason why he should not calmly recall the miseries and the prostration of spirit attendant on that hour, and give them touching and pathetic expression?
"Supplication to man may diffuse itself through many topics of persuasion; but supplication to God can only cry for mercy." ”

“ And the deponent also declares that his abetting of this crime [Pg 291] has ever since lain heavily upon his conscience, and has at times harrowed his soul with the most dreadful remorse; and that he cannot die in peace until he has made a frank, and full confession of this sin, and implored forgiveness of God, and his fellow men; more particularly of those whom he has thus injured. ”

“ Remorse was in him, and remorse made him long to wreak some savage vengeance somewhere; he would have little cared how or on whom.
"They say so. You know as much as I do. It has been a terrible blow to us; to keep quiet, and cover as much as we can, is all we shall be able to do. ”

“ It is well for the unfortunate to be resigned, but for the guilty there is no peace. The agonies of remorse poison the luxury there is otherwise sometimes found in indulging the excess of grief. ”

“ You must indeed suffer from remorse, madam, if you think it is not doing enough to give, as is your custom, to all who beg openly; it is incumbent upon you also to seek out those who are too proud to beg. ”

“ Seems teeming with Endless Destruction never to be repelld t
Desperate remorse swallows the present in a quenchless rage ”

“ Human retribution cannot reach this guilt; human feeling may not penetrate the flinty heart that perpetrates it; but an hour is surely coming, with more than human retribution on its wings, when that flint shall be melted, either by the power of penitence and grace, or in the fires of remorse. ”

“ There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or without repentance." ”

“ The urging of that word ‘judgement’ hath bred a kind of remorse in me. ”

“ And for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral senses—the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all. ”

“ can love, and then be wise? Not that remorse did not oppose temptation; A little still she strove, and much repented And whispering 'I will ne'er consent'—consented. ”

“ The day of reckoning comes, and bitterly do the culprits realize that the tortuous game of vice is not worth the candle. Casuistical theologians may attempt to explain away the notions of punishment in the life to come, of retribution beyond the grave. But the shallowest thinker will not deny the realities of remorse. ”

“ When under a cloud of disgrace, instead of that insensibility, cynicism, or levity common to true criminals, they show deep sorrow, shame, and remorse, which not infrequently result in serious illness or death. ”

“ He says that remorse is ay question of stomach and religious education, and that a man with a sound digestion, who had never heard anything about hell in his childhood, might rob and kill from morning to night without feeling any other remorse than fear of the police. ”