Passages about guilt and redemption

Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.

Give me chastity and continency, only not yet.

Count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.

Tiresias tells Oedipus that his wisdom is dreadful when it brings its possessor no profit, and refuses at first to say what he knows.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the way to understanding, has ordained the fixed law that wisdom comes by suffering.

The watchman on the roof says he has been lying there a year like a dog, learning the stars by heart, and that he would speak if the house could bear it, but an ox stands on his tongue.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in!

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.

You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you for learning me your language!

Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made. Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe

That to the height of this great argument / I may assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust. Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast.

Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Stay a while! You are so beautiful!

It's not God that I don't accept, Alyosha, I only most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Am I my brother's keeper?

I suffered those deeds more than I performed them.

Not to be born is best of all; and next best, by far, is to go back quickly where you came from.

Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Ye have heard that it was said of them of old time, Thou shalt not kill; but I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.

A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.

One thing, and only one thing, is necessary for Christian life, righteousness, and freedom. That one thing is the most holy Word of God.

Fair is foul, and foul is fair: / Hover through the fog and filthy air.

I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o'erleaps itself / And falls on th' other.

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse / Without all hope of day!

Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

I saw him, I blushed, I turned pale at the sight of him.

It is Venus entire, fastened on her prey.

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge.

There is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed.

Life, as we find it, is too hard for us; it brings us too many pains, disappointments and impossible tasks.

Man has become a kind of prosthetic God.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

A great ox stands upon my tongue.

Zeus, who sets mortals on the road to understanding, who made it law that by suffering they shall learn.

The mother is not the parent of what is called her child, but the nurse of the newly sown seed. The one who mounts is the parent.

This is my ruling: a tie in the votes acquits the man.

Pylades, what shall I do? Am I to feel shame at killing my mother?

Have pity, child, on this breast, where many times you drowsed and sucked the milk that made you.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.

My soul doth magnify the Lord. He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree. He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.

All hope abandon, ye who enter in.

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.

Man's nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him. All that is in the heavens and in the earth belongs to Him.

There is no compulsion in religion: true guidance has become distinct from error.

Roland is brave and Oliver is wise, and both are men of amazing courage.

Companion Roland, sound your horn of ivory. Charles will hear it and the army will turn back. Roland answers: God forbid that my kinsmen should be blamed for me, or that sweet France should fall into disgrace.

In Italy six hundred and forty; in Germany two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France, in Turkey ninety-one; but in Spain, in Spain already one thousand and three.

Give me your hand, and say yes. It is not far; let us go from here.

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed.

I didn't kill a human being, I killed a principle.

An extraordinary man has the right, that is, not an official right, but an inner right, to decide in his own conscience to overstep certain obstacles.

For half a century the housewives of Pont-l'Eveque envied Madame Aubain her servant Felicite.

And when she breathed her last, she thought she saw, in the opening heavens, a gigantic parrot hovering above her head.

If you take the life-lie away from an average man, you take his happiness away with it.

I am the thirteenth at table.

He was sixteen. For six years now he had been a man's hunter. For six years now he had heard the best of all talking.

It was of the men, not white nor black nor red, but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive.

But Jonah rose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.

You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord.

Saul was head and shoulders taller than any of the people. When Samuel said to all the people, Do you see him whom the Lord has chosen? there is none like him among all the people, all the people shouted, Long live the king!

You are the man! Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul. Why have you despised the word of the Lord, to do what is evil in his sight?

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us.

So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.

Jesus, observing his disciples engaged in conventional prayer and thanksgiving over bread, laughs at them directly, and when they ask why, tells them that they do not know him and that their worship, however sincere, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding rather than genuine spiritual insight.

Jesus takes Judas aside privately and reveals to him alone an elaborate account of the cosmos's actual origin, describing the great invisible Spirit and the lesser, ignorant powers, including a figure called Saklas, who actually created and rule over the material world the other disciples mistakenly worship as divine.

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God comes to our realm, although he was not far from us before. For no part of creation is left void of him; he has filled all things everywhere, while remaining present to his Father.

He took to himself a body capable of death, in order that it, participating in the Word who is above all, might be sufficient for death on behalf of all, and might, because of the Word who was come to dwell in it, remain incorruptible.

Siegfried, killer of a dragon and owner of the Nibelung treasure, comes to Worms to win Kriemhild, sister of the Burgundian king Gunther, and helps Gunther by trickery to win the Icelandic queen Brünhild, a deception that will eventually prove fatal.

A quarrel between the two queens exposes the deceit by which Brünhild was won, and Gunther's vassal Hagen murders Siegfried and sinks the treasure in the Rhine, converting Kriemhild's husband's death and the lost treasure into a permanent grievance.

Sigmund draws the sword that Odin thrust into the tree in Volsung's hall, which no other man could move, and the saga follows the sword through its breaking and reforging into the hand of his son Sigurd.

Sigurd kills the dragon Fafnir, wins its cursed gold, tastes its blood and understands the birds who warn him of Regin's treachery, and rides to wake the valkyrie Brynhild from her enchanted sleep.

Dante and Virgil emerge from Hell to see again the stars, and Dante writes that to course over better waters the small vessel of his talent now hoists sail, leaving behind so cruel a sea.

Virgil explains that neither Creator nor creature was ever without love, natural or of the mind, and that natural love is never in error, but the love of the mind can err in its object, or in too much or too little vigor.

Petrarch describes climbing Mont Ventoux in Provence with his brother Gherardo on 26 April 1336; Gherardo takes the direct steep route while Petrarch keeps seeking easier paths and finds himself lower than before, which he reads as a figure for his own moral life.

At the summit, overwhelmed by the view, Petrarch opens the copy of Augustine's Confessions he carries and lands on the passage rebuking men who admire mountains and neglect themselves, a sudden interruption of pure aesthetic wonder by religious self-examination.

At Arthur's New Year feast a huge green knight offers to take a blow from an axe if the striker will accept one in return a year later, Gawain beheads him, and the knight picks up his head and rides off, establishing the poem's central binding wager.

At a castle on the way, a lord proposes to exchange each day's winnings while the lady of the house tries to seduce him, and Gawain accepts a green girdle said to protect him and hides it, a single significant lapse within otherwise scrupulous honor.

Julian describes seeing all creation as a small thing the size of a hazelnut, resting safely in the palm of God's hand, and understanding through this vision that everything exists and continues to exist only because God loves it and actively sustains it in being.

Julian relates the parable of the lord and the servant, in which a faithful servant falls into a ditch while hastening to do his lord's will, and the lord regards him not with anger but with compassion, reframing human sin's relationship to divine judgment through this unconventional parable.

The first book warns directly against learning pursued without humility, insisting that intellectual sophistication and theological knowledge accomplish little of genuine spiritual value if pursued without the corresponding interior humility that alone makes such learning actually useful to the soul.

The second book turns inward to the interior life, treating sustained self-examination and interior transformation, rather than external religious observance considered on its own, as the genuine substance of Christian spiritual practice the reader is being guided toward.

Arthur draws the sword from the stone, proving his right to the throne, and subsequently founds the Round Table, establishing the fellowship of knights whose adventures, alliances and eventual internal betrayals will structure the entire remainder of the narrative.

Galahad alone achieves the quest of the Holy Grail, his exceptional purity succeeding where Lancelot's otherwise considerable chivalric excellence cannot, a pointed distinction between worldly knightly virtue and the specifically spiritual worthiness the Grail quest actually requires.

Luther argues that the pope cannot remit the guilt of sin or release souls from purgatory for money, challenging indulgence sales at their actual doctrinal foundation rather than merely objecting to their obvious commercial abuse or the greed of individual preachers selling them.

Luther insists that true repentance is a lifelong inward turning rather than a purchased receipt, reframing Christian penitence as continuous internal disposition rather than a single external transaction any payment could complete or substitute for.

Luther distinguishes alien righteousness, the righteousness of Christ given entirely from outside a person and received purely through faith, from proper righteousness, the ordinary righteousness of good conduct and just dealing that grows out of the first rather than producing it.

Alien righteousness swallows up sin at once upon being received through faith, Luther argues, even though its full implications and effects continue working themselves out gradually across an entire lifetime of sustained faith rather than resolving immediately and completely.

To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation calls on lay rulers to reform a church Rome will not reform, and argues that every baptised Christian is a priest, demolishing the institutional walls that had protected papal authority from lay political intervention.

The Babylonian Captivity of the Church reduces the seven sacraments to two or three and attacks the mass understood as a sacrifice offered by priests, a technical theological argument written in Latin specifically for an audience of fellow theologians rather than general readers.

Luther defines the key words of Romans in turn, law, sin, grace, faith, righteousness, flesh and spirit, building a compact systematic account of his theology through careful attention to the epistle's own specific vocabulary rather than abstract independent argument.

Luther argues that sin is not simply the wrong act but the unbelieving heart behind it, and that the law cannot cure this underlying condition but only exposes it, since no amount of correct outward behavior touches the actual unbelief driving sinful action.

All men of whatsoever quality they be, who have done anything of merit, or which really has a semblance of merit, if so be they are men of truth and good repute, should write the tale of their life with their own hand.

I began to throw in the pewter plates, plates and bowls, to the number of some two hundred, all at once, into the channels, feeding the furnace at the same time with wood, until the fury of the fire caused the bronze to flow.

Young men boarding in Luther's house at Wittenberg took notes from 1531 onward on what he said over supper, and these scattered notes were gathered and printed only after his death, producing thousands of short entries in a mixture of German and Latin.

The entries range across scripture and predestination, the papacy and the Turks, music and marriage, moving without warning between weighty theological subjects and considerably more mundane topics within the same conversational setting.

Faustus, having exhausted logic, medicine, law and divinity as conventional learning's inadequate limits, turns to magic, conjures the devil Mephistopheles, and signs away his soul in his own blood for twenty-four years of unlimited knowledge and power.

Despite his purchased unlimited power, Faustus spends his twenty-four years on largely trivial pursuits, playing tricks on the Pope, fetching grapes for a duchess, being shown a pageant of the seven deadly sins, and calling up the shade of Helen of Troy for private aesthetic pleasure.

Richard, Duke of Gloucester, tells the audience he is determined to prove a villain and sets out to remove everyone between himself and the throne, giving the play's central antagonist unsettling self-aware intelligence about his own moral status.

He woos Lady Anne over the corpse of the husband he killed, has his brother Clarence drowned in a wine butt, and has his young nephews murdered in the Tower after seizing the crown, escalating villainy through calculated rhetorical and physical cruelty.

To finance his friend Bassanio's courtship of the heiress Portia, the merchant Antonio borrows from the Jewish moneylender Shylock, whom he has long abused, and agrees in jest to forfeit a pound of his flesh if he defaults on the loan.

Bassanio wins Portia by choosing the right casket, but Antonio's ships are lost and Shylock demands the bond, converting the romantic plot's happy resolution into direct confrontation with the financial crisis threatening Antonio's actual life.

The Duke of Vienna pretends to leave the city and hands power to the strict deputy Angelo, then stays behind disguised as a friar to watch, allowing him to observe his own city's actual moral condition and his deputy's real character firsthand.

Angelo revives a dormant law and condemns Claudio to death for getting his fiancée pregnant, and offers to spare him if Isabella sleeps with him, revealing absolute power's genuine corrupting potential with unusual directness.

Leontes, king of Sicilia, suddenly convinces himself that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia, staging jealousy as genuinely irrational psychological eruption rather than response to actual evidence.

He imprisons Hermione, has the newborn daughter abandoned on the Bohemian coast, and learns from the oracle that he was wrong just as his son and, apparently, his wife die, one man's delusion inflicting cascading harm across his entire family.

Sir Giles Overreach, a ruthless extortioner modelled on a real monopolist of the period, has ruined his own nephew Wellborn financially and schemes coldly to marry his daughter Margaret to a lord, treating both family relationships as purely instrumental to his own financial and social advancement.

Wellborn, with the help of the rich widow Lady Allworth, tricks Overreach into believing he is about to marry her and so restore his ruined credit, a deception that uses financial manipulation with genuine poetic justice against a man who built his fortune through exactly this kind of calculated scheme.

Polyeucte tells Néarque, who urges caution, that he can no longer bear to see idols worshipped as gods, and that he will overturn them at the very altar, whatever the cost to himself, since faith once truly received cannot be practiced only in secret.

Pauline pleads before Félix, her own father, that whatever crime Polyeucte has committed against the state's gods, he remains her husband and an innocent man by every standard that actually matters, and that condemning him would be an injustice dressed as law.

Don Juan, a nobleman who takes any woman he wants and believes in nothing but arithmetic, abandons his new wife Elvire and moves from seduction to seduction with his servant Sganarelle protesting behind him throughout the play's entire action.

Don Juan mocks a beggar's faith, cheats a creditor, rejects his father's pleas, and finally adopts hypocrisy as a calculated strategy rather than experiencing any genuine change of heart, escalating his cruelty toward everyone around him.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and I laid me down in that place to sleep, and as I slept I dreamed a dream.

The name of the slough was Despond. Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire.

Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen. / Come, you daughters, help me lament.

Und die Hohepriester und Ältesten hielten einen Rat über Jesum, dass sie ihn töteten. / And the chief priests and elders took counsel against Jesus, that they might kill him.

He holds him with his glittering eye, the wedding guest stood still, and listens like a three years' child, the mariner hath his will.

Instead of the cross, the albatross about my neck was hung.

The lamp must be replenish'd, but even then / It will not burn so long as I must watch.

Forgetfulness! I ask of ye not one / Of your more terrible gifts, but that. / Ye have it not.

Adonais, the dead poet, is mourned by Urania and by the personified dreams and desires that were his poems, and by a procession of fellow poets including a self-portrait of Shelley, gathering an entire poetic community around Keats's death and loss.

The poem turns from grief to consolation: Adonais is not dead but has become part of the one Spirit that animates nature, a specifically Romantic and pantheist answer relocating immortality within nature's ongoing processes rather than any conventional Christian afterlife.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree, where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea.

A savage place! as holy and enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted by woman wailing for her demon-lover!

There is a vice called Cruelty, and this Sin of thine is crueler than any name Vice ever wore.

I am he that stabbed his friend, and sister's lover, ignorant of both, in the mere darkness of a jealous fit.

Micawber declares that his own financial rule of life is simple: annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness; annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery, a formula he himself never once manages to actually live by.

Uriah Heep insists repeatedly on his own umbleness, how umble he is, how umble his mother is, a performed humility David gradually recognizes as covering a genuinely dangerous, calculating ambition to rise by controlling those around him.

Hester Prynne stands on the public scaffold before the assembled town, the scarlet letter A sewn conspicuously onto her chest, refusing under repeated pressure to name the father of her child, absorbing the community's full public judgment alone rather than implicating Dimmesdale.

Roger Chillingworth arrives in Boston under an assumed name, discovers his wife Hester's public shame and correctly suspects the minister Dimmesdale's involvement, and rather than exposing him publicly devotes himself entirely to a sustained, secret campaign of psychological torment against the guilt-wasted minister.

William Dorrit, presiding over the Marshalsea's debtors as its unofficial Father for so many years that he has ceased fully to register his own imprisonment as confinement, receives the prison's customary tributes and courtesies with a threadbare, entirely sincere dignity that the novel presents as genuinely tragic rather than merely absurd.

News of an unexpected inheritance arrives and frees the Dorrit family from the Marshalsea after decades of confinement, and the novel makes clear almost immediately that the money, far from healing the family, simply relocates William Dorrit's prison-formed vanity and denial into a wealthier, more socially visible setting.

Eliot pauses the narrative directly to defend her own method, insisting that she would rather represent men and women as they actually are, in all their imperfection, than paint them as ideally beautiful or ideally wicked, since it is the ordinary, flawed people among whom most readers actually live their own lives.

Hetty Sorrel, vain and shallow in ways Eliot never disguises or excuses, is seduced by the young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and when she discovers herself pregnant and abandoned, flees rather than face her family's judgment, wandering until she finally abandons her newborn child.

Lincoln observes that both sides in the war read the same Bible and prayed to the same God, each invoking His aid against the other, refusing to let Northern listeners hear the war's outcome as simple divine vindication of one side's righteousness over the other's wickedness.

Lincoln names slavery directly as the war's actual cause, stating plainly what political caution had kept him from saying so directly for years, and suggests that God may be exacting from the whole nation, North and South together, payment for the wealth piled up by two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and the novel opens on the Oblonsky household thrown into confusion by the husband's affair with the governess.

Anna, married to a senior official in Petersburg, falls in love with the officer Vronsky, leaves her husband and son for him, and is slowly destroyed by society's exclusion and her own jealousy, until she throws herself under a train.

Solness remains haunted by the fire that destroyed his wife Aline's family home and killed their infant sons, a catastrophe he half believes he willed into being, and one that, by clearing the ground for new construction, made possible the architectural career and reputation he has since built.

Hilde Wangel arrives and reminds Solness that ten years earlier, after he climbed the tower of a church he had built, he kissed her, then a young girl, and promised her a kingdom, a promise she has evidently taken seriously enough to return and hold him to a decade later.

Marcher confides to May Bartram his lifelong secret conviction that something rare and strange, some extraordinary fate, is reserved specifically for him, crouching like a beast in the jungle and waiting to spring, and she agrees to watch and wait for it alongside him.

Across years of quiet companionship, May comes to love Marcher, a devotion he fails entirely to notice, so thoroughly absorbed in watching for his own extraordinary fate that the actual, available relationship developing directly in front of him passes completely unrecognized.

The anthology opens with metrical versions of the Psalms, Christianity's own inherited Hebrew hymnbook, establishing the collection's starting point in Hebrew scripture before moving into the distinctly Christian hymn traditions that developed across the following centuries.

Dies Irae, one of the medieval Latin sequences included in the collection, confronts the day of judgment with unsparing, genuinely terrifying directness, a starkness in its treatment of final reckoning that later hymns in the collection considerably soften.

Freud observes that in mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty, while in melancholia it is the ego itself that has become so, a distinction he treats as the single most important clue to what actually distinguishes normal grief from pathological depression.

He proposes that the melancholic has unconsciously identified with the lost object, so completely that the ego itself comes to stand in for what has been lost, and that the reproaches and hostility originally directed at the lost object are consequently turned against the ego instead, producing the melancholic's characteristic self-accusation and self-hatred.