Quotes About Guilt

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group. But

People like to say the West is a guilt-based culture, while that of Japan is based on shame, with the chief distinction being that the former is an internalized emotion while the latter depends on the presence of a group.

Guilt is what happens when there isn't a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn't care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

sublimation, a primitive part of her mind trying to propitiate her guilt over having failed to protect Nason. Over having inadvertently doomed her. Trauma never went away. You could try to block it, or bury it, or bludgeon it into submission. But something with that much power couldn't really be contained. The best you could hope for was a way to channel it.

Tiresias of these two worlds that the distinction is less important than people would have you believe. Guilt is what happens when there isn't a group to shame you. Regret, horror, atrocity—if the group doesn't care, we simply invent a God who does. A God who might be swayed by the subsequent good acts, or at least efforts, of an erstwhile wrongdoer.

She had shared his sheets, and, in nightmares of remorse, he had shared her body, waking with drastic regret, feeling as soiled and soilsome as the city itself.

Guilt is like a sore, endlessly fascinating, and the guilty party feels compelled to examine it and pick at it, so that it never really heals.

There's always someone at fault, which is not the same as blame.

I discovered something that night that most people never have to learn: murder is sin, murder is damnation (surely of one's own mind and spirit, even if the atheists are right and there is no afterlife), but murder is also work.

I'm sure there are people who, even suddenly understanding the true situation, would have felt no more than a twinge of regret or vague guilt as they continued to sit in embarrassed silence beside the grieving, confused man. On the other hand, I am equally certain there are people who would have been far more sensitive in the first place, who may have recognized that a deeper problem existed and reached out to understand and help before I did.

she could not distinguish between contrition and self-abasement; between acknowledgment and blame.

You've got it backward. You're doing it to yourself. Punishing yourself for something you didn't have the power to change. You can't forgive yourself, so you refuse to forgive anybody else.

Seemed she should learn to smile when she was unhappy, to stop laughing, to speak up, to never speak to strangers, to share guilt for the acts of strangers, that strangers made the laws of the land, that the laws of the land valued things over life, that life ended if a stranger decided it, to be where she could be found, to feel one thing and do another. How could she hang so many contradictions in one skull

Modern Germans were confirmed pacifists. They wanted no mention of the former wars, either directly or indirectly. By and large they were consumed with historical guilt, bleeding their anguish in rivulets of pride.

If you've been a Christian very long, you may be wondering why I left out the guilt, the condemnation, and the promises to get better and better in every way, every day. I left them out because they simply aren't in the Bible.

Wealth is a common side effect of no remorse.

don't do anything unless you are asked to do it. Once the relationship has reached this stage, the typical commitmentphobic feels too guilty to ask anything of a woman because he doesn't want her to ask too much of him.

It is an irony still to be appreciated by many scholars that by so maximizing sinfulness (before God every man is guilty of every conceivable sin) Protestants tried to minimize its psychological burden (no man is required to ponder and recite his every actual sin)

Though truth-telling sheds no blood, it requires a painful emotional sacrifice on the part of the confessors in the form of shame, guilt, and a unilateral disarmament of their chief moral weapon, the claim to innocence.

Sympathy, recall, tends to be expressed in communal relationships, the kind that are also accompanied by guilt and forgiveness. Anything that creates a communal relationship, then, should also create sympathy.

Not only the guilt, but the love of sin, and its dominion, are taken away, subdued by grace, and cordially renounced by the believing pardoned sinner.

You will always know whether you are delivered from the guilt of sin by answering this question: Am I delivered from the love of sin?

The light of love drives away the darkness of guilt.

read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment,