Quotes About Guilt

True guilt is guilt at the obligation one owes to oneself to be oneself. False guilt is guilt felt at not being what other people feel one ought to be or assume that one is.

Focus on guilt will always breed fear, and focus on innocence will always breed love. Any time we project guilt onto someone else, we are fortifying the experience of guilt within ourselves. Like blood on Lady MacBeth's hands, we cannot remove our own guilty feelings as long as we are judging others.

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.

As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black children without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.

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

Guilt isn't always a rational thing, Clio realized. Guilt is a weight that will crush you whether you deserve it or not.

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 remember as a child of eight being told by a young friend that I had killed Christ. That was news to me. It's a common experience for the Jewish young. Should later generations of Germans be burdened with the guilt arising from the profound inhumanity of their ancestors? Revenge may be sweet, but guilt is non-transferable. Still, hatreds survive with the persistence of cockroaches.

Only a fool is interested in other people's guilt, since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself: Who am I that all this should happen to me? To find the answer to this fateful question he will look into his own heart.

One of the reasons I love prayer is that it is an antidote to guilt and blame. If we are unhappy with the way we have acted or been treated, instead of stewing in self-recrimination on the one hand, or harboring ill will toward someone else on the other, prayer gives us a way out of the circle of guilt and blame. We bring our painful feelings into the open and say, "I have done wrong," or "I have been wronged." And then we ask for a vaster view--one that contains within it all the forgiveness we need in order to move forward.

And this is what I want you to understand, that good, real good, was born out of your father's remorse. Sometimes, I thing everything he did, feeding the poor on the streets, building the orphanage, giving money to friends in need, it was all his way of redeeming himself. And that, I believe, is what true redemption is, Amir jan, when guilt leads to good.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

His guilt is why Acheron went out of his way to make sure that all of you had servants and pay for your work. The Dark-Hunters owe that man everything, and I do mean everything. He pays in blood every time one of you wants to go free, and he suffers every day so that you can all live your cushy little lives of wealth and privilege.” … “And I have to say that every time one of your turns on him, it seriously pisses me off. Acheron asks nothing from any of you and that’s exactly what he receives.

Experience had taught me that innocence seldom utters outraged shrikes. Guilt does. Innocence is a mighty shield, and the man or woman covered by it, is much more likely to answer calmly: 'My life is blameless. Look into it, if you like, for you will find nothing.' That is the tone of innocence.

Rescuing women from their burden of unwarranted guilt is going to require "educational practices and socializing agents" even more effective than the ones that have been relentlessly loading female humans with responsibility for other people's behavior from their earliest childhood.

We routinely leave our small children in day care among strangers. At the same time, in our guilt we evince paranoia about strangers and foster fear in children.

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

Marriage may restrict your activity, but it increases your pleasure. It permits sex without shame, fear, or guilt.

Let me be the ring leader in your guilt gang-bang.

You can't look outside of yourself. You must look within yourself, and address all of the things that are going on within you, and clear out the things that are not useful. Whether it's fear or anger or shame or guilt or whatever it is - clean that stuff up.

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.

Traditional Muslims stand at the foot of the ladder, living in guilt for not really practicing Islam. At the top are fundamentalists, the ones you see in the news killing women and children for the glory of the god of the Qur'an. Moderates are somewhere in between. A moderate Muslim is actually more dangerous than a fundamentalist, however, because he appears to be harmless, and you can never tell when he has taken that next step toward the top. Most suicide bombers began as moderates.

Satan will try to use our memory of any previous guilt to lure us back...We must be ever vigilant to avoid his enticements

Guilt implanted at a tender age is not easy to destroy. A weed, it sprouts in unexpected places.

Purim, one of my favorite holidays. It's like the original drag queen's holiday. It's when all the Jewish men go for it and feel no guilt for a change.

Reality cannot be photographed or represented. We can only create a new reality. And my dilemma is how to make art out of a reality that most of us would rather ignore. How do you make art when the world is in such a state? My answer has been to make mistakes, but when I can, to choose them. We are all guilt victims choosing mistakes, and as Godard said, the very definition of the human condition is in the mise-en-scéne itself.

Our guilt has its uses. It justifies much in the lives of others.

Guilt was a fascinating thing: it seemed not to weaken over time. If anything it grew stronger as the circumstances faded from memory, as the fear and the necessity became abstract. And only her own actions stood out with crystal clarity.

There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.

Nobody becomes a writer overnight. Well, I'm sure somebody did, but that person's head probably went all asplodey from paroxysms of joy, fear, paranoia, guilt and uncertainty. Celebrities can be born overnight. Writer's can't. Writers are made - forged, really, in a kiln of their own madness and insecurities - over the course of many, many moons. The writer you are when you begin is not the same writer you become.

Defending the truth is not something one does out of a sense of duty or to allay guilt complexes, but is a reward in itself.

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.

To stand by yourself -- that was also part of dignity. That way, a person could get through a public flaying with dignity. Galileo. Luther. Even somebody who admitted his guilt and resisted the temptation to deny it. Something politicians couldn't do. Honesty, the courage for honesty. With others and yourself.

My outlook was so limited that I assumed that all deviates were openly despised and rejected. Their grief and their fear drew my melancholy nature strongly. At first I only wanted to wallow in their misery, but, as time went by, I longed to reach its very essence. Finally I desired to represent it. By this process I managed to shift homosexuality from being a burden to being a cause. The weight lifted and some of the guilt evaporated.

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

A lot of the guilt didn't help my drinking at that point. I never expected a divorce to happen in my life particularly, but it just slowly happened. My wife was proud of me, but she hated the business, and for good reason. The spouses get moved, shoved aside, and ignored, and it's just, it's terrible.

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

For many decades my relations with my parents constituted unfinished business. I had dealt with them through sheer avoidance and guilt.

But if you ever come to a road where danger; Or guilt or anguish or shame's to share. Be good to the lad who loves you true, And the soul that was born to die for you; And whistle and I'll be there.

I expend far too much of my maternal energies on guilt and regret.

I've spent fifteen years of my life fighting for our right to be free and make love whenever, wherever... And you're telling me that all those years of what being gay stood for is wrong... and I'm a murderer. We have been so oppressed! Don't you remember how it was? Can't you see how important it is for us to love openly, without hiding and without guilt?

The brutal truth is, we're scarcely 'educating' children at all. Even if you overlook the guilt, fear, bigotry, and dangerous anti-intellectual flapdoodle being funneled into young brains by schools on the religious right, what we're doing is training kids to be cogs in the wheels of commerce.

The Constitution does not trust judges to make determinations of criminal guilt.

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

Religion is a complex and often contradictory force in our world. It fosters hope and comfort but also doubt and guilt. It creates both community and exclusion. It brings societies together around shared belief and tears them apart through war. However, what unites the faithful, whatever their religion, is the unshakeable force of generosity.

The extent of one man's guilt may be defined by how much of it is experienced by the party he injured.

We can think about how we reduce the pain in paying. So, for example, credit cards are wonderful mechanisms to reduce the pain of paying. If you go to a restaurant and you are paying cash, you would feel much worse than if you were paying with credit card. Why? You know the price, there's no surprise, but if you're paying cash, you feel a bit more guilt.

Indulgence, twin sister of guilt.