Quotes About Guilt

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

A good conscience fears no witness, but a guilty conscience is solicitous even in solitude. If we do nothing but what is honest, let all the world know it. But if otherwise, what does it signify to have nobody else know it, so long as I know it myself? Miserable is he who slights that witness.

Instead of giving birth to dreams and accomplishment, Level 2 self-talk creates guilt, disappointment, and an acceptance of our own self-imagined inadequacies.

Replace the guilt with pride, the sorrow with smiles, gather the broken pieces of the heart, and dance

His intelligence only exacerbated the guilt Kugel felt for bringing him into the world. It was one thing to have condemned a child to life, that was criminal enough, but life was a sentence more easily served by fools.

I spent the best years of my life atoning for something I didn't do, something my parents didn't do, something done just about before I was ever even born. I got no complaints with that, but I'm about all atoned out, and I ain't yet gotten round to atoning for the things I did do.

Guilt is the hyena that'll lunge from behind and hamstring you.

Her grief for both of them was flavored with guilt the way salt flavors the sea; she could taste it in the tears.

She finally cannot stand the pressure of the gUilt, and she kills herself.

Sometimes it's part of the guilt and grieving process-to con- sider suicide as an alternative to the pain. But the answer is life, Andy, not death.

When we don't deal honestly with our lives and the losses we face, when we try to anesthetize the pain and move on, then the suppressed anger or fear or guilt will deal with us until we are ready to deal with those issues.

Nice rear assembly. I thought. I felt a mild twinge of guilt, considering Abigail's plight, but I couldn't help evaluating Tom's retreating posterior, and putting it in terms of canine structure was second nature.

was largely a response to white guilt. This guilt is the vacuum in moral authority created by all of white America's moral failings and infidelities to democracy: racism, sexism, imperialism, materialism, conformity, environmental indifference, educational inequality, superficiality, greed, and so on.

By the night of my encounter with Dick Gregory the goal of the civil rights movement had escalated from a simple demand for equal rights to a demand for the redistribution of responsibility for black advancement from black to white America, from the "victims" to the "guilty." This marked a profound—and I believe tragic—turning point in the long struggle of black Americans for a better life.

Because white guilt is a vacuum of moral authority, it makes the moral authority of whites and the legitimacy of American institutions contingent on proving a negative: that they are not racist. The great power of white guilt comes from the fact that it functions by stigma, like racism itself. Whites and American institutions are stigmatized as racist until they prove otherwise.

Most any time race is given importance, positively or negatively, people are hiding from their true motivations. In the age of racism, whites said blacks were inferior so as not to see their own desire to exploit them, their true motivation. In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism.

the benevolent paternalism of white guilt, I said, had injured the self-esteem, if not the souls, of minorities in ways that the malevolent paternalism of white racism never had.

white guilt was now a greater problem for minorities than white racism. He wanted to reassure them that blacks

I really enjoy making sure the kids get a healthy dinner, a good bath and several books... I really like to try and end the day with some quality time with my kids. If not, I feel guilty.

I feel guilty about spending so much time away from home and loved ones.

For the first time, the best may err, art may persuade, and novelty spread out its charms. The first fault is the child of simplicity; but every other the offspring of guilt.

Sorry about the blood in your mouth. I wish it was mine. I couldn't get the boy to kill me, but I wore his jacket for the longest time.

Maybe under all that guilt and certainty that he couldn't love again, he still wanted me. I would have liked to have found out. But I didn't have the time. Instead, I punched him.

Guilt is a supreme waste of time and energy.