Guilt Quotes - Page 7

The thoroughly guilty man has an advantage over all of us; he cannot be found more guilty of anything, since he has already found himself guilty of everything. This may sound like an absurdity - causing oneself extreme pain in order not to feel any number of little pains of lesser guilts and shames, but it has its own logic. A man more easily adapts to what he inflicts upon himself; as to his own judgement, he is already committed to it and willing to live with it.

Robert C. Solomon

Men like that — when they know they won’t be found out — they will do anything.

Michelle Paver

But when we make choices that are different than what our friends are doing, it might seem to them that we are questioning their choices - even if it has nothing to do with them.... And what is the sense in feeling guilty about making different choices than our mothers and the other women before us? Our mothers did the best they could with what they had available to them. Our choices, if different from theirs, are not a denouncement of theirs.

Jennetta Billhimer

It was a stark choice: shoes or food; beauty or sustenance; the sensible or the self-indulgent. "I'll take the shoes," she said firmly.

Alexander McCall Smith

You should never have a relationship based on guilt over someone's poor choices.

Bryant McGill

...Except when I was alone. I'd hate myself. It's how we feel about ourselves when we're alone that must guide our decisions.

Tom Rob Smith

People who own their lives do not feel guilty when they make choices about where they are going. They take other people into consideration, but when they make choices for the wishes of others, they are choosing out of love, not guilt; to advance a good, not to avoid a bad.

Henry Cloud

With every rise in choices, the expectations double up which puts people deeper down into the rubble.

Ashish Patel

I can learn to live with guilt. I don't care about being good.

Holly Black

On our Journey, we should not dwell on the guilt emerging because of dropping back to Ego-dominated state; instead, we should celebrate that we are in the state of the Presence!

Frank Wanderer

All along, I was less concerned about walking a path of integrity and more caught up in a compass calibrated by greed. And with a compass such as this, how is it that I’m having a hard time understanding why I am where I am?

Craig D. Lounsbrough

He had just compunction enough for having done nothing for his sisters himself, to be exceedingly anxious that everybody else should do a great deal.

Jane Austen

Amory had rather a Puritan conscience. Not that he yielded to it--later in life he almost completely slew it--but at fifteen it made him consider himself a great deal worse than other boys... unscrupulousness... the desire to influence people in almost every way, even for evil... a certain coldness and lack of affection, amounting sometimes to cruelty... a shifting sense of honor... an unholy selfishness... a puzzled, furtive interest in everything concerning sex.There was, also, a curious strain of weakness running crosswise through his make-up... a harsh phrase from the lips of an older boy (older boys usually detested him) was liable to sweep him off his poise into surly sensitiveness, or timid stupidity... he was a slave to his own moods and he felt that though he was capable of recklessness and audacity, he possessed neither courage, perseverance, nor self-respect.Vanity, tempered with self-suspicion if not self-knowledge, a sense of people as automatons to his will, a desire to "pass" as many boys as possible and get to a vague top of the world... with this background did Amory drift into adolescence.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

So I let my shame own me, kill me, wilt me away into a thousand dead flakes, knowing if I kept it all in, she would never have to learn the dirtiness that was forever inside me--the bad, the ugly, the twisted. She could go on living her life happy, just like she deserved.

Jessica Sorensen

Like hatred, guilt can’t be locked in the silence of forgetting, without taking part of your soul with it.

Shannon L. Alder

There was no echo, no reverberation. If anything the room ate sound. It swallowed her voice, her words, and her eternal, inadequate apology. But not her memories. She would never be rid of those.

Laini Taylor

Under these circumstances, silence among such a large group of people is an uncomfortable thing to experience. Guilt spreads around even to those who have nothing to feel guilty about. Many held their breath. Or, as I heard later, many did what me and my mum did and closed their eyes. We closed our eyes in a bid to remove ourselves.

Lloyd Jones

The reality is, no matter what you were told, whatever happened to you as a child was not legally or morally your fault. Abused children are instilled with guilt regarding their "participation." It's an especially complex issue if the abuser is a family member. The child is told and believes that by his word his family will disintegrate, or harm may descend upon other loved ones. He fears he will lose more by telling than not.

Sarah E. Olson

Indeed, to this day, I think if you blame everything on the government, you're not just wrong, you're being reckless. It's as silly as blaming everything on the Freemasons, or the Illuminati, or insert-bad-guy-here. But I do believe that someone must ask the hard questions, especially of our elected officials as well as powerful men who become members of so-called secret societies. Remember: Governments don't lie. People lie. And if you want the real story, you need to find out more about those people.

Brad Meltzer

I feel guilty when I feed them unhealthy food they like. I feel guilty when I feed them healthy food they don’t like. I feel guilty when I drop them off at school. I feel guilty when I pick them up at school. I feel guilty mostly for writing this book instead of spending time with them.

Jim Gaffigan

I felt like I needed to comfort both the little girl inside me and my mother, assuring them that neither of them could have prevented the rape. I didn't want my mother to blame herself and I didn't want to blame the little girl inside of me for not speaking up at the age of six.

Erin Merryn

She heard him speak, but did not recognise the problem in his voice – only later did she realise it was that thing he’d been concealing – known as guilt.

Carla H. Krueger

Our grief is not a cry for war."That's how New Yorkers feel," the driver said. "They know what bombing looks like, and they know the hell it is. But outside New York, people will feel guilty because they weren't here. They'll be yelling for revenge out of guilt and ignorance. Sure, we all want to catch the criminals, but only people who weren't in New York will want to bomb another country and repeat what happened here.

Gloria Steinem

She made him feel guilty at times. The problem was that she was so honest herself, almost transparent. It seemed criminal to be deceiving her.

Emily Arden

What has to do with your ability to fall asleep is not caffeine. It’s having a clean conscience. I have a clean conscience so I can drink all the caffeine I want.

Bob Barr

Look innocent. Have hope.” “Okay.” “And remember…” “What?” “Even O.J. Simpson was acquitted.

Kenneth Eade

All of us have a shadow man dogging our steps that we cannot shake, no matter how hard we try. He reminds us at our best that we are not as good as we appear to be; he bites at our heel with guilt when we find ourselves behaving far beneath our own expectations. That is the human condition. That is why we yearn so for redemption.

Pamela Kay Hawkins

Guilt and misery shrink, by a natural instinct, from public notice: they court privacy and solitude: and even in their choice of a grave will sometimes sequester themselves from the general population of the churchyard, as if declining to claim fellowship with the great family of man; thus, in a symbolic language universally understood, seeking (in the affecting language of Mr. Wordsworth)’ Humbly to expressA penitential loneliness.

Thomas de Quincey

Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.

Lynette Gould

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for me to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed or enforced nor objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.

Ayn Rand

It is through justification of one's actions that a completely guiltless life is possible.

Ashly Lorenzana

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent.

Albert Camus

Just as my body had changed at puberty, now I was developing a sense of guilt, a sense not only of how I appeared to others, but of how I appeared to myself, especially in violating self-imposed prohibitions.

Hanif Kureishi

I lie awake in my bed, clinging to the brightness I have known, fighting back the tide of darkness, the memories of blood and branding and horror, and the legacy of cruelty that runs in my own veins, shaping my own secret vow and wielding it like a brand against the darkness, whispering it to myself, over and over. I will try to be good.

Jacqueline Carey

The victims of PTSD often feel morally tainted by their experiences, unable to recover confidence in their own goodness, trapped in a sort of spiritual solitary confinement, looking back at the rest of the world from beyond the barrier of what happened. They find themselves unable to communicate their condition to those who remained at home, resenting civilians for their blind innocence.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

David Brooks

People generally don’t suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who’ve endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.The Moral Injury, New York Times. Feb 17, 2015

David Brooks

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

J. Budziszewski

To me, a wicked man who is also eloquent seems the most guilty of them all. He'll cut your throat as bold as brass, because he can dress up murder in handsome words.

Euripides

Anatomy lab, in the end, becomes less a violation of the sacred and more something that interferes with happy hour, and that realization discomfits. In our rare reflective moments, we were all silently apologizing to our cadavers, not because we sensed the transgression but because we did not.

Paul Kalanithi

Are guilt and regret not messages from inside of us, letting us know that our moral compasses have been recalibrated and are pointing in the right direction?

Rhian J. Martin

Takamasa Saegusa: 'Seigen, a mere member of the Toudouza, had the effrontery to sully the sacred dueling ground. For that reason, our lord had already decided to subject him to tu-uchi before long. Cut off his head immediately, and stick it on a pike!'Gennosuke could hardly believe his ears. Such an insult to Irako Seigen was unwarranted. It was pride. For Gennosuke, Irako Seigen was pride itself.Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke! It is the way of the samurai to take the head of the defeated enemy on the battleground. Do not hesitate! If you are a samurai, you must carry out the duty of a samurai!'Samurai...Saegusa, Lord of Izu, continued shouting, but Gennosuke did not attend. That word 'samurai' alone reverberated through his body.If one aims at the juncture between the base of the skull and the spine, decapitation is not that difficult, but Gennosuke could muster no more strength than a baby. He grew pale and trembled with the strain. He could only hack with his sword as if he were sawing wood. He felt nauseated, as if his own cells one after another were being annihilated. But this...Lord Tokugawa Tadanaga: 'I approve.'Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke, for this splendid action you have received words of thanks from our lord. As a sign of his exceptional approval, you shall be given employment at Sunpu Castle. This great debt will by no means be forgotten. From this day forward you must offer your life to our lord!'Prostrating himself, Gennosuke vomited.

Takayuki Yamaguchi

At this point, I can no longer avoid setting out, in an initial, provisional statement, my own hypothesis about the origin of “bad conscience.” It is not easy to get people to attend to it, and it requires them to consider it at length, to guard it, and to sleep on it. I consider bad conscience the profound illness which human beings had to come down with, under the pressure of the most fundamental of all the changes which they experienced—that change when they finally found themselves locked within the confines of society and peace. Just like the things water animals must have gone though when they were forced either to become land animals or to die off, so events must have played themselves out with this half-beast so happily adapted to the wilderness, war, wandering around, adventure—suddenly all its instincts were devalued and “disengaged.”From this point on, these animals were to go on foot and “carry themselves”; whereas previously they had been supported by the water. A terrible heaviness weighed them down. In performing the simplest things they felt ungainly. In dealing with this new unknown world, they no longer had their old leader, the ruling unconscious drives which guided them safely. These unfortunate creatures were reduced to thinking, inferring, calculating, bringing together cause and effect, reduced to their “consciousness,” their most impoverished and error-prone organ! I believe that on earth there has never been such a feeling of misery, such a leaden discomfort—while at the same time those old instincts had not all at once stopped imposing their demands! Only it was difficult and seldom possible to do their bidding. For the most part, they had to find new and, as it were, underground satisfactions for them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Aldous Huxley

Start thinking of your guilt as being selfish, because guilt blocks opportunities from arriving for those you care about and for you.

Bryant McGill

Mother's intentions were always sound, never muddy; I don't imagine that she troubled herself to feel very guilty. But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all, was all he had to cling to-especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother. He would continue to torture himself, of course, with the insistent and self-destructive notion that he loved my mother. I suppose that his "love" of my mother was as intellectually detached from feeling and action as his "belief" was also subject to his immense capacity for remote and unrealistic interpretation. My mother was a healthier animal; when he said he wouldn't leave his family for her, she simply put him out of her mind and went on singing.But as incapable as he was of a heartfelt response to a real situation, the Rev. Mr. Merrill was tirelessly capable of thinking; he pondered and brooded and surmised and second-guessed my mother to death.

John Irving

Feelings don’t follow rules. Guilt does. Fear does. But attraction? No way.

David Levithan

There is no guilt in feelings ever.

Erich Maria Remarque

..the thing about depression. When I feel it deeply, I don’t want to let it go. Itbecomes a comfort. I want to cloak myself under its heavy weight and breathe it into my lungs. I wantto nurture it, grow it, cultivate it. It’s mine. I want to check out with it, drift asleep wrapped in itsarms and not wake up for a long, long time.

Stephanie Perkins

It is important to recognize guilt as the temporary teacher it is.

Rebekah Elizabeth Gamble

He wished he could relieve himself of his doubts and guilts half as easily.

George R.R. Martin

What man ever openly apologizes for slander? It is not so much a feeling of slander as it is that of a massive lie, a misdeed not only to the slandered but also to those manipulated in the process. He has made them all, every one, his enemies, thereupon he is so overwhelmed with guilt that he will deny it until his grave.

Criss Jami

No one tape her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way,

Tama Kieves

Each dark conjecture came and for a moment settled like a vulture on Bond's shoulder and croaked into his ear that he had been a blind fool.

Ian Fleming

Give me your past, all your pain, all your anger, all your guilt. Release it to me, and I will be a safe harbor for the life you need to leave behind.

Jewel E. Ann

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. 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.

Audre Lorde

Anger, hatred, and bitterness are lethal poisons. They cause a slow, painful emotional death that only you suffer. Self-destruction will never defeat an enemy or create justice.

James Patterson

Spring is coming....Time for some cleaning. Remove all the self-doubt, worry, jealousy, regret, anger, guilt, or any other negative emotions that are holding you back from your happy, fulfilled life.

Nanette Mathews

It used to be that parents didn't have to be home. If a neighbor so I child misbehaving, it was considered appropriate for the neighbor to intervene. The parents would be grateful when they found out, and they would take the word of the neighbor if the child protested his innocence.Unmarried and divorced parents tend not to behave that way. Instead, they tend to try to be the good guy to their children.

Charles Murray

In Europe the rich are refined enough to act as if they're not wealthy. That is how civilized people behave. If you ask me, being cultured and civilized is not about everyone being free and equal; it's about everyone being refined enough to act as if they were. Then no one has to feel guilty.

Orhan Pamuk

I should have seen it coming.” The words don’t surprise me, but they piss me off. I pull away and glare down at her. “Don’t you fucking dare, Nell Hawthorne. Don’t you dare put this on yourself. You should never have to see shit like this coming.” She backs away, stunned and afraid by the intensity I know is radiating off me. “Colton, I just meant he’s always shown—” “Stop. Just stop right there. Granted, you should’ve never gotten involved with a douchetard like him, but that’s no excuse for what he did.

Jasinda Wilder

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Guilt Quotes - Page 7

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