Your very silence is your confession.

-Euripides
Clytemnestra to Agamemnon, realizing that he plans to sacrifice their daughter, Iphigenia, to secure favourable winds during the Greek expedition against Troy. Iphigenia  Aulidensis, l.1142.

'I know of no joy,'she airily began,'greater than a cool white dress after the sweetness of confession.'

-Firbank, (ArthurAnnesley) Ronald
  Valmouth, ch.4.

As Ihavejust come frommaking my Easterconfessionon Good Fridayand have forgiven all those who trespass against me, I cannot harbour any thoughts of revenge, only contempt for an arrant shit who is bursting with pride, although he is simply being taken for a ride by his women.

-Joseph II
  Of the senior dignitary of the Holy Roman Empire, the Elector- Archbishop of Mainz. Letter to Trauttmansdorff (his representative at Mainz),14  Apr. Quoted in T C  W Blanning Joseph II (1994), p.148.

Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of earliest childhood, is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which is continuous and permanent; which, untouched by all we acquire and all we shed, pushes a green spear through the dead leaves and throughthemould, thrusts a scaled bud through years of darkness until, one day, the light discovers it and shakes the flower free andöwe are aliveöwe are flowering for our moment upon the earth? This is the moment which after all, we live foröthe moment of direct feeling when we are most ourselves and least personal.

-Beauchamp
   Journal entry,  Apr.

Allm a« hlich hat sich mir herausgestellt, was jede groÞe Philosophie bisher war: n a« mlich das Selbstbekenntnis ihres Urhebers und eineArt ungewollter und unvermerkter me¤  moires. It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntaryand unconscious memoir.

-Nietzsche, FriedrichWilhelm
  Jenseits von Gut und Bo«  se (Beyond Good and Evil), section 6 (translated by R  J Hollingdale).

The saddest object in civilization, and to my mind the greatest confession of its failure, is the man who can work, who wants work, and who is not allowed to work.

-Stevenson, Robert Louis
Quoted by Lloyd Osbourne in'The Death of Stevenson', preface toTusitala edition of Weir of Hermiston (published1924).