True Repentance Quotes

True belief and true repentance are twins: it would be idle to attempt to say which is born first. All the spokes of a wheel move at once when the wheel moves, and so all the graces commence action when regeneration is wrought by the Holy Ghost. Repentance, however, there must be. ~ Charles Spurgeon

True repentance has as its constituent elements not only grief and hatred of sin, but also an apprehension of the mercy of God in Christ. It hates the sin, and not simply the penalty; and it hates the sin most of all because it has discovered God's love. ~ William Mackergo Taylor

Yet only when we come to understand, in the light of the Cross, the evil we are capable of, and have even been a part of, can we experience true remorse and true repentance. ~ Pope Francis

Jesus calls all sinners to repent. True repentance is not a nebulous response of sorrow; it requires definite actions. Repentance so transforms the mind that it results in a changed life. Repentance does not merely say "I'm sorry" (similar to what we say when we accidentally step on someone's foot). Rather, true repentance says from the heart, "I've been wrong and grieve over my sin, but now I see the truth, and I will change my ways accordingly. ~ Joel R. Beeke

True repentance always involves reform. ~ Hosea Ballou

True repentance never leads to despair. Its leads home. It leads to grace. ~ John Ortberg

Yes, one can repent of moral transgression. The miracle of forgiveness is real, and true repentance is accepted of the Lord. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Admittedly, repentance is not always easy; I suppose it would not be true repentance if it were. It can also take a longer time than we think or hope. There can be missteps along the way, when we falter or lose heart, but we can reset our course and move forward again, even if it is only one small step at a time. As well as praying for forgiveness, we can also plead for courage, and it will come. If we do so, steady but surely, we will rise from the miry depths of sin and emerge into the sunny uplands of forgiveness and hope. ~ David S. Baxter

True repentance will entirely change you; the bias of your souls will be changed, then you will delight in God, in Christ, in His Law, and in His people. ~ George Whitefield

Don't punish people who repent; heal them. I don't believe that private sin requires public rebuke or removal from office if repentance is taking place. However, when no evidence of true repentance exists, then discipline is in order. ~ Ted Haggard

True repentance is a turning from sin ... Humanly speaking, it is our small part in the plan of salvation. Our part is repenting. God will do the converting, the transforming, and the forgiving. ~ Billy Graham

I grant you true repentance is never too late, but I warn you at the same time, late repentance is seldom true. I grant you, one penitent thief was converted in his last hours, that no man might despair; But I warn you, ~ J.C. Ryle

Wiersbe suggests that a distinction can be made between regret, remorse and repentance. Regret is that activity of the mind (intellect) that causes us to say, "Why did I do that?" Remorse touches us a little deeper causing us to feel disgust and pain (involving both the intellect and the heart), but not causing us to change our ways. True repentance brings in the third aspect of our minds – our will. To truly repent one must have a change of will. "Godly sorrow" is the catalyst that brings us to true repentance. [Warren Wiersbe, Be Reverent, p. 149.]
By Carey Dillinger
From Expository Files 11.6; June 2004 ~ Warren W. Wiersbe

Repentance and faith are distasteful to the unregenerate; they would sooner repeat a thousand formal prayers than shed a solitary tear of true repentance. ~ Charles Spurgeon

Above all sins, guard against bold or arrogant ones. You are not beyond the danger of such. If caught in the web of presumptuous sin, call quickly to God for help. If you hesitate, you only give Satan time to entangle you more tightly. But if you cry out to God in true repentance, He will come at once to rescue you. The sooner you yield to the Spirit, the less damage is done to your soul. ~ William Gurnall

Four marks of true repentance are: acknowledgement of wrong, willingness to confess it, willingness to abandon it, and willingness to make restitution. ~ Corrie Ten Boom

Though true repentance is never too late, yet late repentance is seldom true. ~ Thomas Brooks

Faith in Jesus Christ and a testimony of Him and His universal Atonement is not just a doctrine with great theological value. Such faith is a universal gift, glorious for all cultural regions of this earth, irrespective of language, race, color, nationality, or socioeconomic circumstance. The powers of reason may be used to try to understand this gift, but those who feel its effects most deeply are those who are willing to accept its blessings, which come from a pure and clean life of following the path of true repentance and living the commandments of God. ~ Dieter F. Uchtdorf

True faith begins with true repentance for whatever we have been doing that is wrong. ~ Rick Joyner

God's Love EXPLANATION: Just as Hosea went after his unfaithful wife to bring her back, so the Lord pursues us with his love. His love is tender, loyal, unchanging, and undying. No matter what, God still loves us. IMPORTANCE: Have you forgotten God and become disloyal to him? Don't let prosperity diminish your love for him or let success blind you to your need for his love. Restoration EXPLANATION: Although God will discipline his people for sin, he encourages and restores those who have repented. True repentance opens the way to a new beginning. God forgives and restores. IMPORTANCE: There is still hope for those who turn back to God. No loyalty, achievement, or honor can be compared to loving him. Turn to the Lord while the offer is still good. No matter how far you have strayed, God is willing to forgive you. ~ Anonymous

True repentance begins with KNOWLEDGE of sin. It goes on to work SORROW for sin. It leads to CONFESSION of sin before God. It shows itself before a person by a thorough BREAKING OFF from sin. It results in producing a DEEP HATRED for all sin. ~ J.C. Ryle

Ingredient 2: Sorrow for Sin "I will be sorry for my sin" (Psa 38:18). Ambrose calls sorrow the embittering of the soul. The Hebrew word "to be sorrowful" signifies "to have the soul, as it were, crucified." This must be in true repentance: "They shall look upon me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn" (Zec 12:10), as if they did feel the nails of the cross sticking in their sides. A woman may as well expect to have a child without pangs as one can have repentance without sorrow. He that can believe without doubting, suspect his faith; and he that can repent without sorrowing, suspect his repentance. Martyrs shed blood for Christ, and penitents shed tears for sin: "she ... stood at his [Jesus'] feet ... weeping" (Luk 7:38). See how this limbeck[19] dropped. The sorrow of her heart ran out at her eye ... ~ Thomas Watson

True repentance includes sorrow for sin and contrition of heart. It breaks the heart with sighs and sobs and groans ... ~ Thomas Brooks

The proof of true repentance is immediate restitution. ~ Mike Murdock

Everybody makes mistakes, but you can't keep asking people to forgive you again and again.


True repentance makes you happy and makes the other person happy. Without it, trust will disappear and both of you will be less happy.

The other person will know by the way you act that you're truly beginning anew. Even if the other person doesn't see it right away, don't quarrel or be afraid. Just practice well and steadily, and slowly the truth will be revealed and the relationship will improve. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

Kindness and Truth should always hold hands. Together they are powerful and fully capable of spreading insight and revelation, while also generating conviction and true repentance. However, one without the other is never as beneficial or profitable.

When truth is spoken in a callous manner, or merely in a hurried fashion, discourse will most likely follow. By forgetting to speak honest words with the love and kindness of God behind them, our candor will put folks off. This in turn hinders our effectiveness and the work of the Holy Spirit ~ Cheryl Zelenka

A true repentance shuns the evil itself, more than the external suffering or the shame. ~ William Shakespeare

Can true repentance exist without faith? By no means. But although they cannot be separated, they ought to be distinguished. ~ John Calvin

Remorse is as the heart in which it grows; If that be gentle, it drops balmy dews Of true repentance; but if proud and gloomy, It is the poison tree, that pierced to the inmost, Weeps only tears of poison. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

True repentance is to cease from sin. ~ Ambrose

A true work of fiction does all of the following things, and does them elegantly, efficiently: it creates a vivid and continuous dream in the reader's mind; it is implicitly philosophical; it fulfills or at least deals with all of the expectations it sets up; and it strikes us, in the end, not simply as a thing done but as a shining performance. ~ John Gardner

A woman cannot bear to feel empty and purposeless. But a man may take real pleasure in that feeling. A man can take real pride and satisfaction in pure negation: 'I am quite empty of feeling. I don't care the slightest bit in the world for anybody or anything except myself. But I do care for myself, and I'm going to survive in spite of them all, and I'm going to have my own success without caring the least in the world how I get it. Because I'm cleverer than they are, I'm cunninger than they are, even if I'm weak. I must build myself up proper protections, and entrench myself, and then I'm safe. I can sit inside my glass tower and feel nothing and be touched by nothing, and yet exert my power, my will, through the glass walls of my ego'.
That, roughly, is the condition of a man who accepts the condition of true egoism, and emptiness, in himself. He has a certain pride in the condition, since in pure emptiness of real feeling he can still carry out his ambition, his will to egoistic success.

Now I doubt if a woman can feel like this. The most egoistic woman is always in a tangle of hate, if not of love. But the true male egoist neither hates nor loves. He is quite empty, at the middle of him. Only on the surface he has feelings: and these he is always trying to get away from. Inwardly, he feels nothing. And when he feels nothing, he exults in his ego and knows he is safe. Safe, within his fortifications, inside his glass tower.

But I doubt if women c ~ D.H. Lawrence

Whatever dreams I have wished have come true. ~ Annette Funicello

Men are in the habit, when the truth is exhibited by the servants of God, of saying, All is mystery; they have spoken in parables, and, therefore, are not to be understood. It is true they have eyes to see, and see not, but none are so blind as those who will not see. ~ Sam Smith

Everything in Louisiana is about layers. There are layers of race, layers of class, layers of survival, layers of death, and layers of rebirth. To live with these layers is to be a true Louisianian. This state has a depth that is simultaneously beyond words and yet as natural as breathing. How can a place be both other-worldly and completely pedestrian is beyond me; however, Louisiana manages to do it. Louisiana is spooky that way. ~ Don Lemon

he said this turning his strong body to face the beautiful, stunning, breathtaking, astonishing, bewildering girl who was a princess and his one true love, Eodwyn. she had hair like raven wings and skin like snow that the dogs haven't peed on yet and cheeks like cherry blossoms and eyes like a magnificent summer sky. ~ J.K. Ashton

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. ~ Dan Simmons

I hold it true that thoughts are things
Endowed with bodies, breath, and wings,
And that we send them forth to fill
The world with good results - or ill.

That which we call our secret thought
Speeds to the earth's remotest spot,
And leaves its blessings or its woes
Like tracks behind it as it goes.

It is God's law. Remember it
In your still chamber as you sit
With thoughts you would not dare have known,
And yet made comrades when alone.

These thoughts have life; and they will fly
And leave their impress by-and-by,
Like some marsh breeze, whose poisoned breath
Breathes into homes its fevered breath.

And after you have quite forgot
Or all outgrown some vanished thought,
Back to your mind to make its home,
A dove or raven, it will come.

Then let your secret thoughts be fair;
They have a vital part and share
In shaping worlds and moulding fate --
God's system is so intricate. ~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What happened to the American Dream? It came true! You're lookin' at it ~ Edward Blake

Go through your phone book, call people and ask them to drive you to the airport. The ones who will drive you are your true friends. The rest aren't bad people; they're just acquaintances. ~ Jay Leno

You're not going to hear me do a rap song, you're not going to hear me do a jazz song. We have to be true to our roots, do what we do, and try to do it a little better each time. ~ Bob Seger

True Love Isn't Hearts & Flowers. It's Blood & Guts & Bouquets Of Barbed Wire ~ Dean Cavanagh

I am not afraid of nightmares, because mine came true and I lived through them. ~ Victoria Schwab

If your repentance and God's forgiveness of your sin does not lead to total surrender to God, you should wonder if you truly repented. ~ Gail Davis

A true preacher is best measured not by how many bouquets have been pinned on him but by how many brickbats have been pitched at him. Prophets have been on the receiving end of mud more than medals. ~ Vance Havner

A designer ... has the true responsibility to give his audiences not what they think they want, for this is almost invariably the usual, the accustomed, the obvious, and hence, the unspontaneous. Rather, he should provide that quality of thought and intuition which rejects the ineffectual commonplace for effectual originality. ~ Lester Beall

Chrysta Bell looks like a dream and Chrysta Bell sings like a dream. And the dream is coming true. ~ David Lynch

I'm not stopping. My dream has come true, and I'm staying. ~ Rita Coolidge

[T]he idea of treating Mind as an effect rather than as a First Cause is too revolutionary for some–an "awful stretcher" that their own minds cannot acommodate comfortably. This is as true today as it was in 1860, and it has always been as true of some of evolution's best friends as of its foes. For instance, the physicist Paul Davies, in his recent book The Mind of God, proclaims that the reflective power of human minds can be "no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless purposeless forces" (Davies 1992, p. 232). This is a most revealing way of expressing a familiar denial, for it betrays an ill-examined prejudice. Why, we might ask Davies, would its being a by-product of mindless, purposeless forces make it trivial? Why couldn't the most important thing of all be something that arose from unimportant things? Why should the importance or excellence of anything have to rain down on it from on high, from something more important, a gift from God? Darwin's inversion suggests that we abandon that presumption and look for sorts of excellence, of worth and purpose, that can emerge, bubbling up out of "mindless, purposeless forces. ~ Daniel C. Dennett

I have lots of interests, but it's true that dancing is a very full-time job. ~ Deborah Bull

I found that there is very little interest in Washington for true election reform. That neither the White House nor either house of the Congress seems to be as committed to guaranteeing democratic participation in this country as we seem to be in other countries. ~ DeForest Soaries

No offense, doll, but that's not something I'm willing to share. I'd prefer to live a long and happy life if it's all the same to you."
"You can't just throw out vague allegations and then say nothing else!"
"See, that's the good thing about being a fugitive like me. I can do what the hell I like, and I'm not answerable to anyone." Stepping away from the bars, he stands with his legs stretched out wide. His stance matches his grin.
"Sure looks like that's working out well for you," I say, piercing him with a scornful look. ~ Siobhan Davis

But that night, he fell asleep thinking it was whacked, fucking insane but it was true. He ~ Kristen Ashley

And I say that to tell a prince to his face that you have dreamed of his doom invites the dreamer's doom as well. And, as you yourself reminded me, it may not be all of the truth. The greatest wisdom of any dreamer is to survive in order to dream again. Besides, how do you really know if what you dream is true or if, in telling of it, you make it come true? ~ Jane Yolen

We accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours. ~ Thomas C. Foster

Teachers wondered why I didn't speak up more in class. Why would I when I knew how precarious words could be, how betraying they were, how vulnerable they made you? ~ Justina Chen

The essence of true religious teaching is that one should serve and befriend all. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

To know worldly relations as being 'relation' (temporary) will resolve everything. However, if they are believed to be true (real) relations, there will be insistence. In relative relations, one is not to prove 'I am correct'. One has to bring about a closure by saying, 'you are correct'. ~ Dada Bhagwan

Often, we get crushes on others not because we truly love and understand them, but to distract ourselves from our suffering. When we learn to love and understand ourselves and have true compassion for ourselves, then we can truly love and understand another person. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

My wife and children seem to like me quite a bit, and as long as that is true, I'm really OK. ~ Brian Williams

In order for your dreams to come true, you've got to stay awake. ~ Charles Durning

They were now their own unavoidable experiment, and were making themselves into many things they had never been before: augmented, multi-sexed, and most importantly, very long-lived, the oldest at that point being around two hundred years old. But not one whit wiser, or even more intelligent. Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since, dogs when we had been wolves. But also, despite that individual diminuation, finding ways to accumulate knowledge and power, compiling records, also techniques, practices, sciences
possibly smarter therefore as a species than as individuals, but prone to insanity either way ... ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

Honestly, you can't manage expectations. It has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with everyone else. And everyone else is going to have expectations, and all you can do is do your job and do your best and be true to yourself. ~ Erin Davie

Clifford paints true-to-life characters with the same gritty touch as the best of Dennis Lehane. Straightforward and edgy, Lamentation gnaws with nail-biting tension on every page. A must-read for contemporary hardboiled mystery fans who appreciate the type of terse dialogue and real life conflicts and settings Elmore Leonard so richly brought to life. ~ Robert Dugoni

Those who are unconquered in spirit are the real successes in life. If you can so train or condition your mind that you are content regardless of what you have or do not have, and if you can stand the challenge of all your trials and remain calm-that is true happiness. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

I think that the entertainment industry itself has a history of chasing success. Any time a hit product comes out, all the other companies start chasing after that success and trying to recreate it by putting out similar products. ~ Shigeru Miyamoto

It is a great thing to see physical courage, and greater still to see moral courage, but the greatest to see of all is spiritual courage; oh, to see a person who will stand true to the integrity of Jesus Christ no matter what he or she goes through! ~ Oswald Chambers

If you speak your mind and if it is true what you're saying, then I think the integrity of what you're saying carries through. ~ Bill Cosby