Quotes About Remorse

the irreversibility of things is a kind of death at the heart of life and threatens constantly to steer us into time past- the home of nostalgia, guilt, regret and remorse, the great spoilers of happiness.

God sends drunks blackouts because if they knew what they had done they would surely die of shame.

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

Though the dungeon, the scourge, and the executioner be absent, the guilty mind can apply the goad and scorch with blows.

Ah, how I rue that what I could have done I did not do!

It does not matter who forgives you, if you're the one who can't forget.

You can keep dividing and dividing and you'll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no

Some stains never wash out.

To be forgiven, the person has to be sorry. In Judaism, that's called teshuvah. It means 'turning away from evil.' It's not a one-time deal, either. It's a course of action. A single act of repentance is something that makes the person who committed the evil feel better, but not the person against whom evil was committed.

Suicides, almost by definition, are all ghosts - stuck earthbound because they are desperate to apologize to their loved ones or because they are so ashamed of themselves.

Doesn't it count for anything if Josef wishes he hadn't done it?" Leo looks at me. "What counts," he says, "is that he did."  Ã¢â'¬Â¢

It doesn't matter who forgives you if you're the one who can't forget.

Anger begins with folly and ends with regret-

That meant that he'd drunk too much too early, and had popped an Alcoterm to burn it off.

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.

You are saying, I would like to but I could never forgive you or myself. I am saying, if you let me kneel before you once, I can live without forgiveness for a very long time.

As Robert Hare, the world's leading expert on psychopathy has stated, psychopaths are "intra-species predators." They have the "capacity to do great harm, repeatedly, without remorse.

Only later, when it may be too late, do we realize that in fact we have made things worse.

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion.

He had never felt so ashamed in his life; he had never imagined that he could behave so cruelly. He wondered how a boy who thought he was a good person really could act in such a cowardly way towards a friend.

This deficiency would be scorched into our future like an ill-considered tattoo.

You were a terrible monster of a man and wherever you are you should feel shame for the way you lived your life.

If Dr. Allenby thought she had any concept of what guilt was, then she was fooling herself. Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing.