Shame Quotes

God is the greatest nurturer of all.

Eddie Capparucci

Shame is an ornament to the young a disgrace to the old.

Aristotle

I count him lost who is lost to shame.

Plautus

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

George Bernard Shaw

O shame! Where is they blush?

William Shakespeare

[W]hen people are ashamed they hold aloof, above all from those nearest to them, and are unreserved with strangers

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Fool me once, shame on youfool me twice, shame on mefool me thrice, I'm gonna get the frying pan!

Anthony Liccione

I’ve realized, though, we can either choose to be vulnerable or have moments of vulnerability sneak up on us. Like when you’re happily alone, strutting around your house naked, but then hear a sound. Suddenly, the comfort and confidence you felt in your own skin evaporates. You run to the nearest room, hurrying to shut the door. Then you wait, and listen quietly for an opportunity to make an escape. Your mind races trying to think of an excuse for your current nude state. You’re embarrassed.But, if you live your life listening for the Lord, obeying when He asks you to be vulnerable, you never have to worry about being walked in on. Your soul is ready to be seen. And, He won’t allow your life to be marked by shame or embarrassment.

If you want to make a difference, the next time you see someone being cruel to another human being, take it personally. Take it personally because it is personal!

And as long as you are in any way ashamed before yourself, you do not yet belong with us.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Nobody taught me to be like this. I was born this way. Since I opened my eyes to the world, I have never slept with a man. Never. Just imagine what purity. I have nothing to be ashamed of.[2000]

But sometimes shame is a more powerful engine than rage. Like rage, it burns hot; and like rage it tends to consume its own furnace.

Jonathan Maberry

Shame ain't black, like dirt, like I always thought it was. Shame be the color of a new white uniform your mother ironed all night to pay for, white without a smudge or a speck a work-dirt on it.

Kathryn Stockett

There is no shame in not knowing your history, the shame lies in not finding out.

The shame of living extends its tentacles around my dreams.

Cynicism is often the shamefaced product of inexperience.

. . . have not some religions, including the most influential forms of Christianity, taught that the heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and intellectually incredible? What else than what we can find could be expected, in the case of people having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear?

Shame hates it when we reach out and tell our story. It hates having words wrapped around it- it can't survive being shared. Shame loves secrecy. When we bury our story, the shame metastasizes.

It is also a warning. It is a warning that, if nobody reads the writing on the wall, man will be reduced to the state of the beast, whom he is shaming by his manners.

The book of Jonah becomes an embarrassing and public reading of your family business. (page iii)

Michael Ben Zehabe

Sugar cane reach up to GodAnd every baby cryingShame the blanket of my nightAnd all my days are dying

And I will raise up for them a plant of renown, and they shall be no more consumed with hunger in the land, neither bear the shame of the heathen any more.

Anonymous

each hour is a room of shame, and I amswimming, swimming, holding my head up,smiling, joking, ashamed, ashamed,like being naked with the clothed, or beinga child, having to try to behavewhile hating the terms of your life.

If you feel ashamed about your need for love & support, it's because you were made to feel this way as a child. It's not a sign of weakness to want affirmation, reassurance or someone to count on; these are natural, appropriate needs. Just make sure to be there for yourself first.

Don't stay too long in the shame-filled grounds of relapse. Fertile soil awaits your return and your recoverying.

I obscenity in the milk of my shame.

Ernest Hemingway

Shame is like melting. You can actually feel your muscles sag and drop, as if your body is preparing you to crawl, or possibly ooze, to the nearest exit.

Maureen Johnson

They know their crime," she said. "They know their shame.

Only love can neutralize shame.

I can't get myself to say what happened next. I cannot cope with even thinking about this let alone living with it.""It is so degrading and I try to forget, it hurts so much because she is my mother."- Graham talks about being sexually abused by his mother

Carolyn Ainscough

He, the man, had seen her, touched her, and had not validated her beauty, her womanliness. He had turned away and gone to his own bed. Like Eve after the fall, her nakedness was obscene to her now.

I'd never undetstood how Hana Could lie so often and easily. But just like anyhting else, lying becomes easier the more you do it.

You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.

That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame.

We are all ashamed in one way or another. Who among us is not stained by the past?

Embarrassing facts, those would really help our children remember their classroom lessons better.

Bauvard

The more judgmental a person is the sadder they are.

Consider letting go of the barriers between yourself and others, let go of the definition our culture has inflicted upon us and allow the best part of ourselves to connect with the wondrous parts of others. Allow yourself to connect in a deeper and more profound way.

When I learned about the gray existing between the black and white of absolute terms, I began to experience more peace. The more I expanded my gray areas (more than 50 shades), the more peace I experienced in my life.

Do not ever get agitated by provoking thoughts and actions. Always keep your calm. This will shame the alien.

Lailah Gifty Akita

She's not ashamed of loving, although those she's loved are few in number; it was/is sweet and true. She's only ashamed she used love as an excuse.

Donna Lynn Hope

...research tells us that we judge people in areas where we're vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we're doing. If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people's choices. If I feel good about my body, I don't go around making fun of other people's weight or appearance. We're hard on each other because we're using each other as a launching pad out of our own perceived shaming deficiency.

There is a quiet transformation happening that is moving us from 'turning on each other' to 'turning toward each other.' Without question, that transformation will require shame resilience. If we're willing to dare greatly and risk vulnerability with each other, worthiness has the power to set us free.

Mae's first impulse was to die of shame, but she realized after a hot, stomach-clenching moment that this was probably impractical.

Sarah Rees Brennan

I remember being a teenager and being ashamed of my musical tastes, at least some of them. My Brian Wilson and Beach Boys fandom, which is as important to me as anything else, was almost like a porn stash. Hide that shit, someone's coming! You couldn't look like me and be black in West Philadelphia and love the Beach Boys the way I did.

Ahmir Questlove Thompson

I am protective of the gentle slope of stomach bulging like an early pregnancy, at my waist. I've earned its existence with everything I've been forced to swallow.

stephanie roberts

Now since shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences, and we only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.

Aristotle

She had heard it was easy to blame others for one's own failures. But that wasn't exactly accurate. It was easy to blame herself for what had happened--hard to live with it.

If one looks at a balancing scale putting “fear of change” on one side and “status quo” on the other, they are often in balance. Change is hard. We tend to accept our condition and no matter how painful, we will not change until the balancing scale is tipped - only when the discomfort becomes greater than the fear of change does the scale tip.

Late one night, during a toss-and-turn fretful sleep, I pondered my crisis. No solutions were on the horizon. I, again, wasted my psychic energy with prayer. Nothing. No angel on a white cloud. No rainbow’s pot of gold. No way to control the people I loved. As I rolled over and put the pillow over my head attempting to block all that was negative, I silently screamed for rescue. Then, in a far away and distinct part of my brain, a small voice said, “You have to do this on your own.”I thought, “Was that the best You can do?” This god, to whom I was desperately sending burnt offerings of my own humiliation, couldn’t send an avenging angel or a wise man imparting wisdom? All You can give me is this feeble message of abandonment? At that moment, I quit believing in that god.

That was a moment where something clarified about shame for me: it’s not just something negative but some kind of arrow, it’s pointing at something, some confusing blend of fear and desire. There was liberation in that, thinking of shame as something to follow, like a path—rather than simply something to be paralyzed by, or try to dissolve, or become second-level meta-shamed by (i.e. “I shouldn’t even be having this feeling of shame…”)

I glanced up at the trees too. Dead. Every one of them gray and white, needles rusted, leaves shriveled at the tips of branches. All the life sucked out of them. Not just the trees. All the plants, ferns, grasses and brush were shriveled, brown, barren.As if a month of winter had set down right here in my driveway and gone on a killing spree...."Love what you've done with the landscape," Cody said. "You could open your own business, you know."..."The hell you talking about, Miller?" I asked Cody."Yard care. You're poison and weed whacker all in one. You can call it Death to All Shrubbery.

It was His gentle voice who calledand sent His angel pain to guide me, through the long ‘n dusty corridors, and empty hallways of my soul.

Knowing what I do now, I think about shame and worthiness in this way: 'It's the album, not the picture.' If you imagine opening up a photo album, and many of the pages are full eight-by-ten photos of shaming events, you'll close that album and walk away thinking, Shame defines that story. If, on the other hand, you open that album and see a few small photos of shame experiences, but each one is surrounded by pictures of worthiness, hope, struggle, resilience, courage, failure, success, and vulnerability, the shame experience are only a part of a larger story. They don't define the album.

Her only shame was that she felt none.

Recovering is a process of coming to experience a sense of self. More precisely, it is a process of learning to sense one's self, to attune to one's subjective physical, psychic, and social self- experience. These woman's core sense of shame and their difficulty tolerating painful emotions had led them to avoid turning their attention inward to their internal sense of things. In recovering, they "came to their senses" and learned to trust their sensed experience, in particular their sense of "enoughness"".

Sheila M. Reindl

It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a 'feeling,' for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence of warmth. And when it reaches overwhelming intensity, shame is experienced, like cold, as a feeling of numbness and deadness. [In Dante's Inferno] the lowest circle of hell was a region not of flames, but of ice---absolute coldness.

Fear and shame are the backbone of my self-control. They are the source of inspiration, my insurance against becoming entirely unacceptable. They help me do the right thing. And I am terrified of what I would be without them. Because I suspect that, left to my own devices, I would completely lose control of my life.

The best way to avoid being confused about Bruce Jenner is get your head out of his bedroom and closet, and then think about all of the things you've been hiding and been miserable about. So what he made his announcement via media. Books, music, movies, business launches are announced in the same manner. Just focus on the feeling of finally disclosing something that enables you to be free and to live as authentically as possible. And then imagine what it's like to own your truth, tell it your way, thus taking away anyone else's ability to spin it their way or use it against you. If you can do any of the above, you will no longer be confused.

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