a.k.a. contrition, remorse, repentance
Complementary virtues¶
- accepting fault
- accountability
- duty
- honor
- humility
- modesty
- rectifactory justice
- responsibility
- shame
Contrasting vices¶
- shamelessness
Virtues possibly in tension¶
TBD
How to acquire or strengthen it¶
TBD
Notes and links¶
TBD
Mentioned elsewhere¶
TBD
Inspirational quotes¶
- “It is often better for a person to recognize a sin than to do a good deed. Recognizing a sin makes a person humble. Doing a good deed often can feed a person’s pride.” ―Leo Tolstoy
- “The godly grief of repentance and the concern of inwardness must above all not be confused with impatience. Experience teaches that to repent at once is not always even the right time to repent, because in this moment of haste, when the engaged thoughts and various passions are still busily in motion or at least tensed in the relaxation, repentance can so easily be mistaken about what really should be repented, can so easily confuse itself with the opposite: with momentary remorse, that is, with impatience; with a painful, tormentingly worldly grief, that is, with impatience. But impatience, however long it continues to rage, however darkened the mind becomes, never becomes repentance; its weeping, however convulsed with sobs, never becomes the weeping of repentance; its tears are as devoid of beneficent fruitfulness as clouds without ran, as a spasmodic shower. But if a person incurred some greater guilt but also improved and year by year steadily made progress in the good, it is certain that year after year, with greater inwardness-all in proportion to his progress in the greater inwardness-he will repent of that guilt from which he year after year distances himself in the temporal sense. It is indeed true that guilt must stand vividly before a person if he is truly to repent, but momentary repentance is very dubious and is not to be hoped for at all simply because it perhaps is not the deep inwardness of concern that sets forth the guilt so vividly, but only a momentary feeling. Then regret is selfish, sensuous, sensuously powerful in the moment, inflamed in expression, impatient in the most contradictory overstatements-and for this very reason it is not repentance.” ―Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits
- “Above all, repentance; not wholesale repentance: “I have sinned, father, I have sinned,” or, still worse, the admission that I am wholly in sin, that I was born in sin, that every step of mine is sin. This admission, collecting, compacting all the sins in one heap, seems to separate them from me and deprives me of that inevitable spiritual use, which by the mercy of God is attached to every sin. … We have a terrible habit of forgetting,—of forgetting our evil, our sins. And there is no more radical means for forgetting our sins, than wholesale repentance. All the sins are boiled down, as it were, into one impermeable mass, with which nothing can be done.” ―Leo Tolstoy, Three phases of life (1905).
- “Of all acts is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.”
―Thomas Carlyle
