Quotes About Guilt

Hollywood people are filled with guilt: white guilt, liberal guilt, money guilt. They feel bad that they're so rich, they feel they don't work that much for all that money - and they don't, for the amount of money they make.

Never feel guilty. Don't hold yourself back by guilt or fear. No other species in the entire world deals with guilt. Guilt is a bizarre emotion that makes you feel bad about decisions that you make.

It doesn't promote your life to reduce unearned guilt... You should get rid of that guilt. It's unearned. You don't deserve it. So when we guilt businessmen into giving, it's not in their self-interest.

Good guilt is a product of love and responsibility. It is a natural, positive instinct that parents and good child care providers have. If bad guilt is a monster, good guilt is a friendly fairy godmother, yakking away in your head to keep you alert to the needs of your baby.

Despite their differences, pride, shame, and guilt all activate similar neural circuits, including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and the nucleus accumbens. Interestingly, pride is the most powerful of these emotions at triggering activity in these regions - except in the nucleus accumbens, where guilt and shame win out. This explains why it can be so appealing to heap guilt and shame on ourselves - they're activating the brain's reward center.

What is guilt? Guilt is the pledge drive constantly hammering in our heads that keeps us from fully enjoying the show. Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.

Drop guilt! - because to be guilty is to live in hell. Not being guilty, you will have the freshness of dewdrops in the early morning sun, you will have the freshness of lotus petals in the lake, you will have the freshness of the stars in the night. Once guilt disappears you will have a totally different kind of life, luminous and radiant. You will have a dance to your feet and your heart will be singing a thousand and one songs.

One last important influence I'll mention is Flannery O'Connor. In high school I shoplifted her Complete Stories. Having read "Good Country People" for class, I really just felt a home in her work. I had little guilt about the theft at the time. I sucked in my stomach and shoved the book into my pants. It's very big. I can still feel how it cut into my body in the most exciting way. Clearly, I don't feel guilt-free about this crime anymore - I wouldn't be mentioning here, looking for some absolution if I did.

Don't take guilt trips. Take a trip to the mall, to the next county, to a foreign country, but NOT to where the guilt is.

Stop putting it off! Procrastination breeds guilt, guilt breeds depression, and depression breeds failure.

Your so-called religions have made you very tense. Because they have created guilt in you. My effort here is to help you get rid of all guilt and all fear. I would like to tell you: there is no hell and no heaven. So don't be afraid of hell and don't be greedy for heaven. All that exists is this moment. You can make this moment a hell or a heaven - that certainly is possible - but there is no heaven or hell somewhere else. Hell is when you are all tense, and heaven is when you are all relaxed. Total relaxation is paradise.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

When the masculine mystique is pulling boys and men out into the world to growl manly noises at one another, the only power with astronger pull on the male psyche is maternally induced guilt. The guilt is quite necessary for our moral development, but it is often uncomfortable.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something--anything--before it is all gone.

Guilt [is] a tool, rather than a weapon against the self.

I carry lots of guilt.

It is a hard thing to let go of mistakes we've made and sins. God wants us to do that because He knows the guilt and the condemnation will keep us from becoming who He has created us to be.

I'm happiest at home hanging out with the kids... Having a family has been my saving grace because I don't work back to back on anything or I'd drive myself to an early grave with guilt and worry for my family, whom I'd never see.

Worry is the product of a future that we cannot guarantee and guilt is the product of a past we cannot change.

You can't possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It's a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and sex must be as bright as the future you gamble.

My kids say if there's any family dinner that doesn't result in somebody crying, it's not a good dinner. They cry because it helps relieve them of a guilt or some onerous emotional burden. It's like a family tradition.

If I were ever to go mad it would be on Thanksgiving Day, that day of guilt and grace when the family hangs upon you like an ax over a sacrificial victim, like the oven's heat on that poor bird.

Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.

...a very terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe [war and human suffering]. I think that's more terrifying than the occasional Hitler ...or other that crop up - these people would not able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity - and therefore I think that it is in some sense the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who should share a very serious burden of guilt, that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and more violent.

I don't feel any guilt complex about The Lord of the Rings.

A wave of blood goes up to my head, my stomach shrinks together, as if something dangerous has just missed hitting me. It's as if I've been caught stealing, or telling a lie; or as if I've heard other people talking about me, saying bad things about me, behind my back. There's the same flush of shame, of guilt and terror, and of cold disgust with myself. But I don't know where these feelings have come from, what I've done.

You will put on a dress of guilt and shoes with broken high ideals.

You don’t have to be at every volleyball game. We can’t guilt ourselves.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

Men's minds are too ready to excuse guilt in themselves.

One thing was absolutely certain—it was a given for Kazuo. Although he might not have particularlyrealized it, or more appropriately, perhaps because he was incapable of coming to such a realization, this was what it came down to: he, Kazuo Kiriyama, felt no emotion, no guilt, no sorrow, no pity, towards the four corpses, including Mitsuru's—and that ever since the day he was dropped into this world theway he was, he had never once felt a single emotion.

The chess world is obligated to organize a match between the champion of the world and the winner of this Carlsbad tournament - indeed, this is a moral obligation. If the world of chess should remain deaf to its obligation, on the other hand, it would amount to an absolutely unforgivable omission, carrying with it a heavy burden of guilt.

White people's fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it's because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people - their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid. When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.

As far as the lawsuit, yes, when I was very young, I went into my father's company, had a real estate company in Brooklyn and Queens, and we, along with many, many other companies throughout the country - it was a federal lawsuit - were sued. We settled the suit with zero - with no admission of guilt. It was very easy to do.

Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

Be this thy brazen bulwark, to keep a clear conscience, and never turn pale with guilt.

Guilt didn't put any butter on the bread of life.

I put Catholic guilt to work pretty good for a rich rock star.

Pain in the present is experienced as hurt. Pain in the past is remembered as anger. Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety. Unexpressed anger, redirected against yourself and held within, is called guilt. The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression.

Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them must share the guilt for the dead.

You never lose the love of God. Guilt is the warning that temporarily you are out of touch.

How extraordinary it is that one feels most guilt about the sins one is unable to commit.

Anyone can be shamed, but feeling guilt requires empathy within.

I think there's a lot of shame in American race relations. There's a lot of suppressed guilt that lashes itself out still. I see that all the time, and whereas opposed to sort of trying to address the issue in an up-front way, they're attacking and thus perpetuating the problem thinking that they're being sophisticated and post-racial, when, in fact, they're being completely regressive.

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

Grace doesn't cause people to live in sin; it frees them from the paralyzing effects of guilt and condemnation so that they can live holier accidentally now than they ever did on purpose before.

Since our awareness of others is considered our duty, the price we pay when things go wrong is guilt and self-hatred. And things always go wrong. We respond with apologies; we continue to apologize long after the event is forgotten - and even if it had no causal relation to anything we did to begin with.

In her memoir, Anne Robinson recounts the wake-up call which motivated her to stop drinking. Leaving her eight-year-old daughter alone in their car while she went to buy liquor, she returned to find her daughter with tears running down her cheeks. The guilt and horror Ms. Robinson felt at this sight jolted her into sobriety.