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REPENTANCE
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I. (noun)
Sense 1
Meaning:
Remorse for your past conduct
Synonyms:
penance; penitence; repentance
Classified under:
Nouns denoting feelings and emotions
Hypernyms ("repentance" is a kind of...):
compunction; remorse; self-reproach (a feeling of deep regret (usually for some misdeed))
Derivation:
repent (feel remorse for; feel sorry for; be contrite about)
repentant (feeling or expressing remorse for misdeeds)
Context examples:
But though everything seemed neat and comfortable, she was not able to gratify him by any sigh of repentance, and rather looked with wonder at her friend that she could have so cheerful an air with such a companion.
(Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen)
The poor woman was very vacillating in her repentance.
(Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)
She trembled, and her lip shook, and her face was paler, as she answered: It has been put into your hearts, perhaps, to save a wretched creature for repentance.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
I began to experience remorse, repentance; the wish for reconcilement to my Maker.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
He had gone some way, lost in doubt and in self-reproach, his mind all tremulous with a thousand new-found thoughts and fears and wonderments, when of a sudden there was a light rustle of the leaves behind him, and, glancing round, there was this graceful, swift-footed creature, treading in his very shadow, with her proud head bowed, even as his was—the picture of humility and repentance.
(The White Company, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)
She managed the recital, as she hoped, with address; prepared her anxious listener with caution; related simply and honestly the chief points on which Willoughby grounded his apology; did justice to his repentance, and softened only his protestations of present regard.
(Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen)
I was going out at my door on the morning after that deplorable day of headache, sickness, and repentance, with an odd confusion in my mind relative to the date of my dinner-party, as if a body of Titans had taken an enormous lever and pushed the day before yesterday some months back, when I saw a ticket-porter coming upstairs, with a letter in his hand.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
As I walked by his side homeward, I read well in his iron silence all he felt towards me: the disappointment of an austere and despotic nature, which has met resistance where it expected submission—the disapprobation of a cool, inflexible judgment, which has detected in another feelings and views in which it has no power to sympathise: in short, as a man, he would have wished to coerce me into obedience: it was only as a sincere Christian he bore so patiently with my perversity, and allowed so long a space for reflection and repentance.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
I beg that gentleman, if he has it in his power, to inform that young woman from me that I forgive her her bad conduct towards myself, and that I call her to repentance—if he will be so good.
(David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens)
These were vile discoveries; but except for the treachery of concealment, I should have made them no subject of reproach to my wife, even when I found her nature wholly alien to mine, her tastes obnoxious to me, her cast of mind common, low, narrow, and singularly incapable of being led to anything higher, expanded to anything larger—when I found that I could not pass a single evening, nor even a single hour of the day with her in comfort; that kindly conversation could not be sustained between us, because whatever topic I started, immediately received from her a turn at once coarse and trite, perverse and imbecile—when I perceived that I should never have a quiet or settled household, because no servant would bear the continued outbreaks of her violent and unreasonable temper, or the vexations of her absurd, contradictory, exacting orders—even then I restrained myself: I eschewed upbraiding, I curtailed remonstrance; I tried to devour my repentance and disgust in secret; I repressed the deep antipathy I felt.
(Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë)
