There is no refuge from confession but suicide; and suicide is confession.

Webster’s aphorism frames guilt as an inescapable moral pressure. If a person has committed a grave wrong, the psyche (and society) demand acknowledgment; the only imagined “refuge” from admitting the truth is self-destruction. The second clause—“suicide is confession”—tightens the logic: even the attempt to evade responsibility becomes a kind of admission, because it signals that something intolerable is being hidden. The line thus treats confession not merely as a legal act but as a moral inevitability: wrongdoing seeks disclosure, and efforts to suppress it only testify to its reality.