Quotes About Guilt

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.

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.

I believe in guilt. There's not enough guilt around these days for my taste.

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

Charity is to unburden you from your guilt, so you say, `I am doing something: I going to open a hospital, going to open a college. I give money to this charity fund, to that trust....` You feel a little happier. The world has lived in poverty, the world has lived in scarcity, ninety-nine percent of people have lived a poor life, almost starving and dying, and only one percent of people have lived with richness, with money - they have always felt guilty. To help them, the religions developed the idea of charity. It is to rid them of their guilt.

I suffer from Irish-Catholic guilt. Guilt is a good reality check. It keeps that ‘do what makes you happy’ thing in check.

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.

You let go of the past, and stop bringing the past into the present and replaying it into the future. You release guilt, shame, and you can create an entirely new pattern for yourself.

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.

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?

Guilt serves a powerful social function in terms of policing our behavior.

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.

I think we all suffer from guilt at some point in our lives, but for the most part I never really regret, and I try to always remain positive. Yes, I think that those issues are very interesting to play in a character, and they're prominent issues in life, and I think people can relate to them.

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.

Mysticism requires the notion of the unknowable, which is revealed to some and withheld from others; this divides men into those who feel guilt and those who cash in on it.

We forget our guilt when we have confessed it to another, but the other does not usually forget it.

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know. We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.

The true liberation of eroticism lies in accepting the fact that there are a million facets to it, a million forms of eroticism, a million objects of it, situations, atmospheres, and variations. We have, first of all, to dispense with guilt concerning its expansion, then remain open to it's surprises, varied expressions, and mingle it with dreams, fantasies, and emotion for it to attain its highest potency.

I'm not doing my philanthropic work out of any kind of guilt, or any need to create good public relations. I'm doing it because I can afford to do it, and I believe in it.

Innocence seldom utters outraged shrieks. Guilt does.

When I feel like I'm not doing what I am supposed to as a mother, I will torture myself. I don't know how to deal with it. I find some consolation in the fact that all mommies feel it. If there was a way to cure mommy guilt, I would bottle it and be a bazillionaire.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

Cheap thrill: moral outrage revels in its own innocence and in the guilt of the wicked Others.

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.

There is an illusion of central position, justifying one's own purposes as right and everybody else¹s as wrong, and providing a proper degree of paranoia. Righteous ends, thus approved, absolve of guilt the most violent means.

I read Butterfly’s Child in one day, totally hooked. It is a captivating novel of love, guilt, sin, justice—and how all these things are, in time, transformed surprisingly and inevitably.

WHAT ARE THE CONSEQUENCES when we go against our instincts? What are the consequences of not speaking out? What are the consequences of guilt, shame, and doubt?

It's not your client's obligation, or your obligation, to prove your client's innocence. It is the prosecution's obligation to - to prove you're client's guilt.

I was living a complete lie. But unfortunately, guilt doesn't make you stop.

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.

Sin is too great an evil for man to meddle with. His attempts to remove it do but increase it, and his endeavours to approach God in spite of it aggravate his guilt.

We have rejected such spectacles as the Coliseum. How then, when we do not even look on killing lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Above all, I regret that scientific experiments-some of them mine-should have produced such a terrible weapon as the hydrogen bomb. Regret, with all my soul, but not guilt.

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.

No guilt is forgotten so long as the conscience still knows of it.

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.

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?

We live in a society where we're not taught how to deal with our weaknesses and frailties as human beings. We're not taught how to speak to our difficulties and challenges. We're taught the Pythagorean theorem and chemistry and biology and history. We're not taught anger management. We're not taught dissolution of fear and how to process shame and guilt. I've never in my life ever used the Pythagorean theorem!

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

He that knows no guilt can know no fear.

whenever I would feel such happiness my guilt alarm went off