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Sackcloth and ashes   Listen
Sackcloth and ashes

noun
1.
A display of extreme remorse or repentance or grief.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Sackcloth and ashes" Quotes from Famous Books



... back again—safe enough," commented Phil, philosophically, holding paint-brush No. 1 in his mouth, while he manipulated with No. 2. "He will come back in sackcloth and ashes; he is just that sort, you know,—thunder and lightning, fire and tow. And they will make it up ecstatically in secret, and pretend that nothing has been the matter, and there will be no going into the parlor for weeks without whistling all the ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... ghostly and abominable smells into our streets; and if that were to haunt us by day and night, a phantom from which there was no escape, to remain till the sins of Europe were expiated, we should soon forget politics and arguments, and be in sackcloth and ashes, positive no longer, but down on our knees before Heaven in awe at this revelation of social guilt, asking simply what we must do ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson

... deep provocation. He thought it all over in his heart, just there, exactly as it all happened, that simple and natural tale of a common wrong, that terrible secret of a lifetime that he was still to repent in sackcloth and ashes, ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... practised for magical purposes in connection with the performance of ceremonies and the sending out of messengers. It has already been pointed out that we have no grounds for regarding such practices as survivals; for if we put on sackcloth and ashes as a penance for our misdeeds, it does not follow that this was ever the prevailing costume. It is even less possible to interpret the ritual lending of wives to messengers as a survival, for, ex hypothesi, the messengers were not of the group which "group-married," ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas

... of women wearing crape during the centennial glorification, the men should sit down in sackcloth and ashes, in humiliation of spirit, as those who repented in olden times were wont to do. The best centennial celebration, said they, for the men of the United States, the one to cover them with glory, would be to extend to the women of the nation all the rights, privileges and immunities ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... entirely a second time to the kingdom of God. "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! woe unto thee, Bethsaida!" cried he; "for if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say unto you, it shall be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for you. And thou, Capernaum, which art exalted unto heaven, shalt be brought down to hell; for if the mighty works which have ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... it, and a merciful Providence may forgive it; but the inexorable monitor of our deeds was all the time beside us writing the record, and the history of that act is inscribed forever in the tissues of our brain. It may be repented of bitterly in sackcloth and ashes and be discontinued, but its effects can never be quite effaced; they will remain with us a handicap till our dying day, and in some critical moment in a great emergency we shall be in danger of defeat from that long past ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts

... know even his whole name—Vivian only, this and nothing more; he, a British officer, in a mad impulse (I am like him) marries my mother, nobody's daughter, and a ballet dancer, during a run he made to New York city just thirty-five years ago; my sire repents in sackcloth and ashes, dragging us with him; sells out; living by his wits anyhow and anywhere, chiefly at gaming places abroad. At a German suburb once he had left us, my late husband came to our cottage to enquire his road; as he was an American, ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny

... and, if possible, its still kinder climate, which combines the soft warmth of South Devon with the bracing freshness of the Welsh mountains; where winter has slipped out of the list of the seasons, and mother Earth makes up for her summer's luxury by fasting, 'not in sackcloth and ashes, but in new silk and old sack;' and instead of standing three months chin-deep in ice, and christening great snowballs her 'friends and family,' as St. Francis of Assisi did of old, knows no severer asceticism than tepid shower-baths, and a parasol ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... would be very hard to answer, were there not other questions that I could ask. Of course I was wrong to marry him. I know that now, and I repent my sin in sackcloth and ashes. But I did not leave him after I married him till he had brought against me horrid accusations,—accusations which a woman could not bear, which, if he believed them himself, must have made it impossible for him to live with me. Could any wife live with a husband ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... yearning for that world of beauty which might have been, but which the acts of the clever and the practical have turned into carrion among the ruins. Would it matter now if we were bankrupt, and our Empire among the things that were, if only we were turning to sackcloth and ashes because of that dousing of the glim in the heart of ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... Staff! In sackcloth and ashes, I confess I thought that kind of father only existed in women's books ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice



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