Guilt Quotes

Let no guilty man escape if it can be avoided. No personal consideration should stand in the way of performing a public duty.

Ulysses S. Grant

Let wickedness escape as it may at the bar it never fails of doing justice upon itself for every guilty person is his own hangman.

Seneca

He who flees from trial confesses his guilt.

Syrus

My prescription for better health is to let go of the six things that could be destroying it—anger, regret, blame, resentment, worry, and guilt.

Charles F. Glassman

Out, damned spot! out, I say!

William Shakespeare

I had told him I was searching for my keys, that's what had taken me so long in the car, and I squeezed him tighter, as if I could crush my little lie.

Mitch Albom

I would only blame myself if something happened to you.

Shannon A. Thompson

One of the more gratifying things about guilt is that it makes us feel important.

Susan Beth Pfeffer

There has been no single influence which has done more to prevent man from finding God and rebuilding his character, has done more to lower the moral tone of society than the denial of personal guilt. This repudiation of man’s personal responsibility for his action is falsely justified in two ways: by assuming that man is only an animal and by giving a sense of guilt the tag “morbid.

Fulton J. Sheen

God never estimates what we give from impulse. We are given credit for what we determine in our hearts to give; for the giving that is governed by a fixed determination. The Spirit of God revolutionises our philanthropic instincts. Much of our philanthropy is simply the impulse to save ourselves an uncomfortable feeling. The Spirit of God alters all that. As saints our attitude towards giving is that we give for Jesus Christ’s sake, and from no other motive.

Oswald Chambers

Morrigan "What are guilt ferrets:"Atticus "They're bastards. They cling to your neck and tickle and bite and generally make you miserable, which is a pretty good trick for a metaphor." They were also impervious to logic, perhaps their most diabolical power.

Kevin Hearne

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.

Whittaker Chambers

What was it about women and crying that made me feel like crap? They must have guilt pheromones in their tears.

John Corwin

Enough of this guilt," he told her, his voice reduced to a cracked whisper. "What's done is done.

Alexis Steinhauer

Every morning I wake up, I feel guilty; every breath of borrowed time is heavy in my chest."-Lo-The Wild Hunt

Ashley Jeffery

Guilt: the gift that keeps on giving.

Erma Bombeck

Far be in from me to dictate how you should assuage your guilt. Do you have a lot of it?"She bit his good shoulder. "You're about to find out."She toppled them both off the bench and onto the mat. "Well, ouch. I take it guilt doesn't bring out your gentler side.

J D ROBB

My stomach hurts, but if it's guilt or impacted stool, I can't tell. Either way, I'm so full of shit.

Chuck Palahniuk

You can always count on your family to love you. And to betray you. And then to feel guilty about it.

Holly Black

I remember that life in that room seemed to be occurring beneath the sea, time flowed past indifferently above us, hours and days had no meaning. In the beginning our life held a joy and amazement which was newborn every day. Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear; but they did not work themselves to the beginning until our high beginning was aloes on our tongues. By then anguish and fear had become the surface on which we slipped and slid, losing balance, dignity, and pride.

James Baldwin

Guilt and fear are a kind of rot. It spreads unless it's cleaned. And there's only one way to do that.

Lee Goldberg

Archer tries not to think of his own state of purity, physically unsullied, yet now spiritually beyond redemption, his thoughts plagued by lithe limbs and brilliant blue eyes. Doctor Archer has never really understood women, nor has he ever had time for courtship; this is a sacrifice he has willingly made for his career. He thought - believed - for most of his adult life that his vocation was to tend the sick of mind. Romance was a frivolity, carnal urges something he successfully sublimated, resisting the drive to spoil himself. Now, in the overbearing loneliness of his 4am bed he touches himself in secret, panting and hungry and stunned by shame

John T. Fuller

You know this is wrong."It isn't a question. When he turns, White is still wrapped snug in the counterpane, motionless, just his gaze pursuing the doctor about the room. "I am wrong to do this." The doctor says it as if instructing himself. White says nothing. With a sigh, Archer sits on the edge of the bed, smoothing White's curls back from his forehead. "Do you know what we did last night?" To admit it, to speak out loud, seems in itself a terrible affront. It might be his imagination, but the doctor fancies he sees a slight lowering of black lashes, the tiniest quirk of a shy smile. He says, wearily but not without affection, "No, I don't suppose you do.

John T. Fuller

Damn, she was getting so tangled up by guilt and desire. ~Nikki in Texas Tangle

Leah Braemel

If there was one thing Sam understood, it was guilt. It didn't have to be logical; oftentimes it wasn't. Itsawed at your gut relentlessly, tediously, until you wore it like a scar.

Debra Cowan

Hello." The doctor speaks softly, nervously. Mr White doesn't respond, not even the slightest change of expression. Dr Archer has been thinking. Mulling it over in his head, endlessly, driving himself more insane he thinks than any unfortunate in his care, crazy with this longing. He is afraid of spiders, he watches the clouds, he held up two fingers; he is lucid. He came to me of his own free will; he shares these terrible feelings.

John T. Fuller

Guilt is intense. Suffocating. A brick, tied quietly around your ankles while you sleep. You never fall slowly into guilt-you wake up with little time to take your last breath before being pulled under.

Andrea Randall

Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.

Ernest Becker

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.

Atul Gawande

Ivanov: Once I worked hard and thought a lot but I never got tired; now I do nothing and think of nothing, but I'm tired in body and spirit. My conscience aches day and night, I feel deeply guilty but I don't understand where I am actually at fault. And add to that my wife's illness, my lack of money, the constant bickering, gossip, unnecessary conversations, that stupid Borkin... My home has become loathsome to me and I find living there worse than torture.

Anton Chekhov

Only afterward did the guilt set in--the guilt that for a few minutes he let himself stop feeling guilty.

Tiffany Reisz

You give frequent flyer miles with that guilt trip?

Cecily White

...one half leaning in, one half pulling away.

Jodi Picoult

God knows we all have to at least try to justify our behavior so we don't feel too guilty about it later.

Taylor Nadeau

The passive righteousness of faith frees me from passing final judgment on myself.

Tullian Tchividjian

She opened a small silver compact and looked at her face in its mirror. I am still guiltless, she thought, I have not done it yet. But I will look the same when I have done it; nobody will know the difference by looking at me. She touched the little puff twice to her nose and once to her chin. She closed the compact and put it away.("Mind Over Murder")

Cornell Woolrich

Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn’t matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer.

Jamie Mason

It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather.

Ally Condie

The Homunculi may have started the war, but we were the ones who carried it out.

Hiromu Arakawa

No good has ever come from feeling guilty, neither intelligence, policy, nor compassion. The guilty do not pay attention to the object but only to themselves, and not even to their own interests, which might make sense, but to their anxieties.

Paul Goodman

You have a conscience, and a conscience is a valuable attribute, but not if it begins to make you think you were to blame for what is far beyond the scope of your responsibility.

Philip Roth

The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.

Leo Tolstoy

The Christian soul knows it needs Divine Help and therefore turns to Him Who loved us even while we were yet sinners. Examination of conscience, instead of inducing morbidity, thereby becomes an occasion of joy. There are two ways of knowing how good and loving God is. One is by never losing Him, through the preservation of innocence, and the other is by finding Him after one has lost Him. Repentance is not self-regarding, but God-regarding. It is not self-loathing, but God-loving. Christianity bids us accept ourselves as we really are, with all our faults and our failings and our sins. In all other religions, one has to be good to come to God—in Christianity one does not. Christianity might be described as a “come as you are” party. It bids us stop worrying about ourselves, stop concentrating on our faults and our failings, and thrust them upon the Saviour with a firm resolve of amendment. The examination of conscience never induces despair, always hope…Because examination of conscience is done in the light of God’s love, it begins with a prayer to the Holy Spirit to illumine our minds. A soul then acts toward the Spirit of God as toward a watchmaker who will fix our watch. We put a watch in his hands because we know he will not force it, and we put our souls in God’s hands because we know that if he inspects them regularly they will work as they should…it is true that, the closer we get to God, the more we see our defects. A painting reveals few defects under candlelight, but the sunlight may reveal it as daub. The very good never believe themselves very good, because they are judging themselves by the Ideal. In perfect innocence each soul, like the Apostles at the Last Supper, cries out, “Is it I, Lord” (Matt. 26:22).

Fulton J. Sheen

Let go of self-condemnation and guilt!

Tae Yun Kim

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.

Michael Grant

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.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I should have forgiven him.”“Maybe. Maybe there’s more we all could have done,” he says, “but we just have to let the guilt remind us to do better next time.”I frown and pull back. That is a lesson that members of Abnegation learn – guilt as a tool, rather than a weapon against the self.

Veronica Roth

Living the good life as created beings depends on living within the limits and according to the truths of the human condition. Purity of heart and the capacity to channel desires toward personal self-mastery in holiness are part of the high calling of the Christian life. These remain necessities, despite the promises of a false humanism that claims that human nature has neither limits nor boundaries, being infinitely plastic and malleable -- a vain and counterproductive attempt to liberate humans from guilt.

George Cardinal Pell

Or was their guilt written plainly, and for all the world to see, across their face? Was it their face, in fact, for which they were guilty?

Julie Otsuka

God has broken me in every way possible. I spent a year not caring, a year trying to figure out what I'd done to deserve it. and a year trying to make it right.

Cassandra Giovanni

Repeat the same action over and over again, and eventually it will feel right. Eventually, there isn't even any guilt.

Jodi Picoult

Ninety-six per cent of juvenile prostitutes are fugitives from abusive domestic situations; 66 per cent began working before they turned 16. (Prostitution is their only perceived means of survival.) Millions of children work as prostitutes around the world. A third are male. One study revealed that over 50 per cent of prostitutes are the children of alcoholics or substance abusers, and 90 per cent are deflowered through incest or rape. Ninety-one per cent of prostitutes do not speak of the abuse. (The truth of life is told through the language of behavior.) Abused children suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, guilt, self-destructive impulses, suspicion, fear. Seventy-five per cent of prostitutes attempt suicide. (Imagine their scrapbook of memories.)

Antonella Gambotto-Burke

A guilty person sometimes has the luck to escape detection, but never to feel sure of it.

Seneca

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

Max Frisch

Guilt is a manifestation of condemnation or aversion towards oneself, which does not understand the changing transformative quality of mind.'Seeking the Heart of Wisdom

Joseph Goldstein

Guilt doesn't follow the rules of time. Most things fade with time, regret, eyesight, memories. But guilt feeds on time, and as it feeds, it grows, and when it runs out of time, it begins to gnaw on the guilty.

J.D. Mason

There are two kinds of Communists: the arrogant ones, who enter the fray hoping to make men out of the people and bring progress to the nation; and the innocent ones, who get involved because they believe in equality and justice. The arrogant ones are obsessed with power; they presume to think for everyone; only bad can come of them. But the innocents? The only harm they do is to themselves. But that's all they ever wanted in the first place. They feel so guilty about the suffering of the poor, and are so keen to share it, that they make their lives miserable on purpose.

Orhan Pamuk

I remembered my father telling me when I was a little girl, "Guilt is bullshit. Don't ever let anyone make you feel guilty.

Kaylie Jones

It was the Communists, it was the Mexicans, it was the government. And the only people who acknowledged their guilt weren't guilty at all.

Connie Willis

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

David Sedaris

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Guilt Quotes

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