Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas Kempis

A preference for remorse over definition is a quiet rebuke to the kind of intelligence that treats the soul like a specimen jar. Thomas a Kempis, writing from the devotional world that produced The Imitation of Christ, isn’t anti-thought; he’s anti-evasion. Definitions can be a way to keep experience at arm’s length, to win the argument while dodging the consequence. Remorse, by contrast, is knowledge that hurts. It refuses the safety of abstraction.

The line works because it reverses the usual hierarchy. Most writers and thinkers reach for clarity as the highest good: name it, categorize it, control it. Kempis flips that: the truer form of knowing is moral and embodied. Remorse is a kind of evidence, a verdict delivered by conscience that can’t be cross-examined away. To “know how to define it” hints at a scholastic posture - the medieval impulse to refine terms until they sparkle - while the speaker insists on the messier, more humiliating version of truth.

Subtextually, there’s a warning aimed at spiritual professionals: you can learn the language of repentance without repenting. You can talk about contrition the way a physician talks about fever, coolly, competently, untouched. Kempis wants the heat. In his tradition, remorse isn’t an aesthetic of guilt; it’s a doorway. Feeling it signals that you’re still porous enough to be changed, still reachable by grace. The quote’s sting is also its invitation: stop polishing concepts, start facing what your life is actually saying back to you.