Quotes About Guilt

When we hold onto the negative in ourselves it comes with endless guilt. We hold onto a lifetime of floating visions and regrets about what we should have done or should have become. Conscience recognizes wrong and tries to atone. But guilt turns into resentment. Conscience brings us closer to each other; guilt drives us apart. Create a new feeling. Every time guilt settles in your stomach, write "I forgive" on a piece of paper. Send it up the chimney, tear it up and flush it, put it in the garbage. Don't eat it.

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.

Parents create guilt. That is the greatest sin against humanity. To create guilt in a child is criminal because once the guilt is created, the child will never be free of it. Unless he is very intelligent it will be impossible for him to get rid of it; something of it will remain around him like a hangover.

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.

We've been taught that the Christian life is a life of peace, and when we don't have peace, we assume the problem lies within us. Not only do we feel anxious, but we also feel guilty about our anxiety! The result is a downward spiral of worry, guilt, worry, guilt.

A healthy dose of guilt never hurt anybody. It's what civilization was built on, guilt. A highly underrated emotion.

There are so many more productive things to do than sit around feeling shame and guilt. Beyond touching on shame and guilt in a perfunctory manner, I wouldn't bother with that at all.

A love that left people alone in their guilt would not have real people as its object. So, in vicarious responsibility for people, and in His love for real human beings, Jesus becomes the one burdened by guilt.

There's genuine pain in Eric's eyes. And I feel a stab of guilt. But you can't stay with people because of guilt.

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.

Where is my guilt? I can regret. I can regret that I made the party film, `Triumph of the Will,' in 1934. But I cannot regret that I lived in that time. No anti-Semitic word has ever crossed my lips. I was never anti-Semitic. I did not join the party. So where then is my guilt? You tell me. I have thrown no atomic bombs. I have never betrayed anyone. What am I guilty of?

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.

[Bill Clinton] has settled numerous lawsuits without admitting any guilt on a whole number of things. Are you saying, are you implying that settling a lawsuit is implying guilt? Because if so, it means that your candidate is guilty of an awful lot of things, no.

This was not guilt: guilt is what you feel when you have done something wrong. What I felt was shame: I was what was wrong.

So great are the psychological resistances to war in modern nations, that every war must appear to be a war of defence against a menacing, murderous aggressor. There must be no ambiguity about whom the public is to hate. Guilt and guilelessness must be assessed geographically and all the guilt must be on the other side of the frontier.

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

My doctrine is this, that if we see cruelty or wrong that we have the power to stop, and do nothing, we make ourselves sharers in the guilt.

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, its no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights.

Guilt is the mafia of the mind.

I walk around feeling a sort of existential guilt all the time; and honestly for me this house is a way of feeling less guilty about the universe. - Julia Louis

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

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.

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.

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are, of course, those who suffer because their desire for sex has become compulsive; in their case the drive (loneliness, guilt) is at fault, not the activity as such. When morality is discussed I invariably discover, halfway into the conversation, that what is meant are not the great ethical questions but the rather dreary business of sexual habit, which to my mind is an aesthetic rather than an ethical issue.

Each one of them suffering from the failures of their day, with strings of guilt they tried hard to guide us.

Those who grant sympathy to guilt, grant none to innocence.

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.

It's of no use to look back and say, "I should have been different." At any given moment, we are the way we are, and we see what we're able to see. For that reason, guilt is always inappropriate.

So, in the infinitely nobler battle in which you are engaged against error and wrong, if ever repulsed or stricken down, may you always be solaced and cheered by the exulting cry of triumph over some abuse in Church or State, some vice or folly in society, some false opinion or cruelty or guilt which you have overcome! And I beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

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 knew many Marines had done brave deeds that no one saw and for which they got no medals at all. I was having a very hard time carrying those medals and didnt have the insight or maturity to know what to do with my combination of guilt and pride.

It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse for an undetected crime, but he will not blush... It is not the sense of guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons the face.

Your sense of guilt will linger. It will always be part of you. but sharing it, allowing people to love you anyway, will do you the world of good. Secrets need an outlet if they are not to fester and become an unbearable burden.

If the love object is divine perfection, then one's own self is elevated by joining one's destiny to it... All our guilt, fear, and even our mortality itself can be purged in a perfect consummation with perfection itself.

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.

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.

I refuse to accept as guilt the fact of my own existence.

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

We want to take action out of the desire to contribute to life rather than out of fear, guilt, shame, or obligation.

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

There's so much guilt there attached to having a perfectly good life.

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

I don't believe in guilt, I believe in living on impulse as long as you never intentionally hurt another person, and don't judge people in your life. I think you should live completely free.

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.

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.

I don't believe in "original sin." I don't believe in "guilt." I don't believe in villains or heroes - only right or wrong ways that individuals have taken, not by choice but by necessity or by certain still-uncomprehended influences in themselves, their circumstances, and their antecedents. This is so simple I'm ashamed to say it, but I'm sure it's true. In fact, I would bet my life on it! And that's why I don't understand why our propaganda machines are always trying to teach us, to persuade us, to hate and fear other people on the same little world that we live in.

The parallel between antifeminism and race prejudice is striking. The same underlying motives appear to be at work, namely fear, jealousy, feelings of insecurity, fear of economic competition, guilt feelings, and the like. Many of the leaders of the feminist movement in the nineteenth-century United States clearly understood the similarity of the motives at work in antifeminism and race discrimination and associated themselves with the anti slavery movement.