Quotes About Guilt

So the starting point and the basis of their liberal wails of anguish always and always is guilt. Guilt, guilt, guilt.

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.

Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Fear and guilt are your only enemies. If you let go of fear, fear lets go of you. If you release guilt, guilt will release you. How do you do that? By deciding to.

When it comes to money, if you have it, you may feel that you don't deserve it—guilt. If you don't have it, you may feel that you should have it—guilt.

Catholics have guilt and Jews have guilt, fine. But mothers can trump them all.

If a hungry lion suddenly appeared, you'd be terrified. So terrified you'd probably run away. Great, fear's doing its job. But you might get so afraid that you lock up and can't move. This would be very bad. Guilt's the same. It can prevent you from fixing the situation, make you feel so bad you can't function at 100% and even lead to more guilt-provoking bad behavior.

Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parents' expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child's task or duty to satisfy his parents needs. No argument can overcome these guilt feelings, for they have their beginnings in life's earliest periods, and from that they derive their intensity and obduracy.

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

I had a lot of guilt and shame when I was running from God, but nothing like when I was running for God. I was always looking for God's approval, and that's where the guilt and shame came out in a big way.

I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me.

I have no regrets about not having children. I still wait for the pang of guilt, but I have none. I tune into the television show Nanny 911 occasionally which reminds me how much patience and love it take to be a good parent.

It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become prey to the active. The conditions upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and the punishment of his guilt.

How often have I tried just hard enough so that I can then say to myself that I tried with the real purpose of assuaging my guilt about something I did not wish to succeed in the first place?

I carry lots of guilt.

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

...every man shares the responsibility and the guilt of the society to which he belongs.

Paranoia reduces anxiety and guilt by transferring to the other all the characteristics one does not want to recognize in oneself. It is maintained by selective perception and recall. We only see and acknowledge those negative aspects of the enemy that support the stereotype we have already created.

It is criminal to steal a purse, daring to steal a fortune, a mark of greatness to steal a crown. The blame diminishes as the guilt increases.

That's the strangest thing about this life, about being in the ministry. People change the subject when they see you coming. And then sometimes those very same people come into your study and tell you the most remarkable things. There's a lot under the surface of life, everyone knows that. A lot of malice and dread and guilt, and so much loneliness, where you wouldn't really expect to find it, either.

What kind of guilt comes from being true to yourself but not to others?. As we have seen, being true to yourself may at times intrinsically and necessarily be in conflict with being true to others.

If you accept full responsibility for yourself, you will be released forever from expectation, resentment, blame and guilt.

The violence of war admits no distinction; the lance, that is lifted at guilt and power, will sometimes fall on innocence and gentleness.

Know that every mother occasionally feels "at the end of her rope." When you reach the end of your rope, don't add guilt to your frustration. No one said motherhood was going to be easy.

The day came. The wrath descended. Sin, guilt, and retribution? The manic psychoses of those entities we referred to as states, institutions, systems - the powers, the thrones, the dominations - the things which perpetually merge with men and emerge from them? Our darkness, externalized and visible? However you look upon these matters, the critical point was reached. The wrath descended.

Being hurt inevitably breeds feelings of hatred towards your attacker. But when we hurt others, we have to deal with their hatred for us, and our own feelings of guilt. But knowing what it feels like to be hurt is exactly why we try to be kind to others. That's what makes us human.

Secret guilt is by silence revealed.

This is what I mean by becoming religious: no guilt, no ego, no trip of any kind...just being herenow...being with the trees and the birds and the rivers and the mountains and the stars.

The guilt of Stalin and his immediate entourage before the Party and the people for the mass repressions and lawlessness they committed is enormous and unforgivable.

There is scarcely anything more important in the government of men than the exact - I will ever say pedantic - observance of the regular forms by which the guilt or innocence of accused persons is determined.

Maybe it's the Calvinist guilt about capitalism or mercantilism. But, I like the idea of doing things that only exist for as long as they exist, which are not archives, which are not sold or prepared even. It's funny though, because a lot of my unreliable tours were inspired by the docents at the Japan Society, who are mostly these volunteers from the Upper East Side. They basically find positive messages in really nihilist, perverse videos. So they were my inspiration.

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.

Guilt is the reason they put the articles in Playboy.

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.

It happened. It was awful. You aren't perfect. That's all there is. Don't confuse your grief with guilt.

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

At a certain age, children are total Id - they're anything but beautiful little flowers. That always interests me. The place where the ego and the superego start, and where guilt and socialization and morality takes place, the true root of it.

I'm interested in avoiding two types of behaviour [in my children]: one is the sense of guilt and the other is a sense of entitlement. If these two are avoided, then the rest is up to them.

Judging yourself to be full of virtue paralyses. Judging yourself to be full of guilt also paralyses.

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.

We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility

How blunt are all the arrows of thy quiver in comparison with those of guilt.

A false identity is any lie that contradicts our God-given identities through Scripture. These false identities can be created by ourselves because of sin in our lives, choices made, or wrong turns taken and the regret, guilt, and shame that follows. Other false identities are handed to us by outside sources, maybe a damaging word spoken to us by someone or a childhood of abuse. However, not all false identities are negative on the surface, such as successful, attractive, wealthy, athletic, or talented. But even those identities can become false when we place too much of our weight on them.

I was just a kid. I think I stole a candy bar. I remember feeling so terrible. It was the worst shock. I was probably 7. That's my least favorite feeling: guilt.

It is impossible not to notice that our world is tormented by failure, hate, guilt, and fear.

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

I always take blushing either for a sign of guilt, or of ill breeding.

The sense of anxiety and guilt doesn't come from having too much to do; it's the automatic result of breaking agreements with yourself.