Quotes About Guilt

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.

I release all feelings of worry and guilt. Throughout life, the two most futile emotions are guilt for what has been done and worry about what might be done.

Let him who is without guilt cast the first stone. A trap. Because then he will be no longer without guilt.

Guilt is a good friend, isn't it? It will stand at your back when every other friend has abandoned you, and in the face of all reason it will stay by your side, and even when you tell it, "I am moving on now," it will say, "I shall never leave you; never." If only I could find a lover as faithful as guilt.

You feel guilt when you're not necessarily in the best mood and you say to your fans "No, I don't want to take a photo," or you're not as happy or bubbly as they probably thought you would be. I've had to remind myself that's okay. No one's forcing me or any other celebrity to take time out of their day to say hi to these fans or do these things. There is a sense of guilt that you can feel sometimes for not meeting their expectations, but that's kind of wrong for me to think that way, because I am a person.

The first chapters of the Bible tell us of the sin of man. The guilt of that sin had rested upon every single one of us, it guilt and its terrible results..but..it also tells us of something greater still; it tells us of the grace of the offended God.

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun.

Suffering is just about the easiest of all human activities; being happy is just about the hardest. And happiness requires, not surrender to guilt, but emancipation from guilt.

I think this is one of the problems that we're having in Indigenous affairs. Why we're not confronting the issues that are going to resolve it, the anger and the guilt. The anger on the Aboriginal side; the guilt on the non - Aboriginal side. We have got to deal with that, move on and start doing real work.

If "there is no harm in asking," why guilt and fear when we do so?

Until-as often happened during those first months travel, whenever I would feel such happiness-my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband's voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him: "First of all," I said, "I'm very sorry, but this isn't your business anymore. And secondly, to answer you question...yes.

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.

Let this be your wall of brass, to have nothing on your conscience, no guilt to make you turn pale.

I think subconsciously because of my upbringing, I was very aware of values and morals and that's why I experienced the occasional guilt with my habits.

One of the characteristics of North American culture is that you can always start again. You can always move forward, cross a border of a state or a city or a county, and move West, most of the time West. You leave behind guilt, past traditions, memories. You are as if born again, in the sense of the snake: You leave your skin behind and you begin again. For most people in the world, that is totally impossible.

Loomis has always felt himself responsible for the fact that he did not stop Michael when he first murdered his sister, and so he's got that guilt to live with.

The way to stop feeling guilty is to read stuff - I'm not saying my book, but works by Bertrand Russell or Oscar Wilde, people who weren't losers but who didn't believe in the work ethic, and argued this thing about guilt or wrote philosophy about idleness.

Mr. Avery said it was written on the Rosetta Stone that when children disobeyed their parents, smoked cigarettes and made war on each other, the seasons would change: Jem and I were burdened with the guilt of contributing to the aberrations of nature, thereby causing unhappiness to our neighbors and discomfort to ourselves.

Guilt at least has a purpose; it tells us we've violated some ethical code. Ditto for remorse. Those feelings are educational; they manufacture wisdom. But regret-regret is useless.

We are all these things [...]. Pride, desire, compassion, cleverness, belligerence, fruitfulness, loyalty...and guilt. But above it all stands love. And if we desire to be more than human, that is the star by which we must set our sights.

We have made drugs an Olympic event. It receives most of the coverage at the Games and even the suspicion of guilt can ruin a reputation for life.

Love." She looked at me with those blue eyes. "Isn't it astonishing how confused and complicated such a small,simple word is? It attracts so many other things, doesn't it, that stick to it like barnacles on rock...fear, guilt. Need. You can't even see the rock anymore. I imagine love in its purest form is a rare thing.

Instead of relief or gratitude, more guilt washes over me. Andy's certainly not faultless - no one ever is in a marriage

Guilt is the most destructive of all emotions. It mourns what has been while playing no part in what may be, now or in the future.

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

Everyday he got up. Before sleep wore off, he was who he used to be. Then, as his consciousness woke, it was as if poison seeped in. At first he couldn't even get up. He lay there under a heavy weight. But then only movment could save him, and he moved and he moved and he moved, no movement being enough to make up for it. The guilt on him, the hand of God pressing down on him, saying, You were not there when your daughter needed you.

The problems of society will also be the problems of the predominant language of that society. It is the carrier of its perceptions, its attitudes, and its goals, for through it, the speakers absorb entrenched attitudes. The guilt of English then must be recognized and appreciated before its continued use can be advocated.

We all want to be guilty, because guilt is power.

She wanted to feel him pound away her fears, a hammer to smash through all her guilt and pain and emptiness.

And Jessamine-Jessamine was gazing at her in abject horror, like someone who has seen a vision of their own ghost. For a moment Tessa felt a stab of guilt. It lasted only a moment, though. Slowly Jessamine lowered her hand from her mouth, her face still very pale. "Goodness, my nose is enormous," she exclaimed. "Why didn't anyone tell me?

Leaders who carry unresolved guilt are forced to hide a part of themselves from those to whom they are closest. They have a secret. They are forced to expend time and energy to ensure that no one finds them out. They know they are not completely trustworthy. Often they assume no one else is either. Guilty leaders have a difficult time trusting. Consequently, guilty leaders have a difficult time building teams.

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.

You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount 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.

Nothing can produce so great a serenity of life as a mind free from guilt and kept untainted, not only from actions, but purposes that are wicked. By this means the soul will be not only unpolluted but also undisturbed. The fountain will run clear and unsullied.

Guilt simply says that you are a sinner. And the feeling of shame simply shows you that you need not be a sinner, that you are meant to be a saint. If you are a sinner it is only because of your unconsciousness; you are not a sinner because the society follows a certain morality and you are not following it.

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

There is unspeakable joy... for the person who knows release from guilt and the relief of forgiveness.

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

Have to love the preemptive guilt trip! I will be visiting home for Mother's Day. Hoping for minimal "baby cannon" talk, but realistically that's going to be a big part of the day.

We gather our arms full of guilt as though it were precious stuff. It must be that we want it that way.

I felt a splinter of guilt wedge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I'd hurt Rob. Maybe that's what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we've wounded the people we're trying to protect.

I am tortured when I am away from my family, from my children. I am horribly guilt-ridden.

Alas! how difficult it is not to betray one's guilt by one's looks.

Guilt was never a rational thing; it distorts all the faculties of the human mind, it perverts them, it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason, it puts him into confusion.

Nothing about his life is more strange to [man] or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes overwhelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satisfied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being something more than a mere animal, built at falling short of the high aims he sets for himself.

guilt politics ... I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring.