Quotes About Guilt

She went to the window seat and sat there, sniffling, hating them all, and herself most of all. It was all her fault, everything bad that had happened.

A thousand deaths would still be less than he deserves.

Nothing but this: I did not do it. Yet now I wish I had... I wish I had enough poison for you all. You make me sorry that I am not the monster you would have me be, yet there it is.

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

All men are sinners.

His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy.

It beat down on Ned's head, warm as blood and relentless as old guilts.

He had lived his lies for fourteen years, yet they still haunted him at night.

Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.

Guilt is the unlived life.

Sin is the failure to reach your potential," he wrote. "Guilt is the unlived life.

I've sometimes imagined that if sin had a flavor, it might very well be bacon.

I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?

Guilt is the fertilizer that feeds resentment.

Guilt and fear are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. Love and guilt cannot exist simultaneously any more than love and fear can.

We can perform service to others for a variety of reasons. We can do good deeds because of fear, guilt, or the desire to inflate our egos. But if we really want to be loving, if we truly wish to respond to the call of justice and freedom, we must first have the courage to look into our own emptiness. We must somehow even come to love it.

Guilt says, "If only you had done it better." Shame says, "If only you had been better.

Somehow, the telling of all this rinsed my mind clean and left me able to think clearly once more. By gathering and sorting my own feelings so, I was finally able to fashion a scale on which I could weigh my father's nature and find a balance between my disgust for him and an understanding of him; my guilt in the matter of his death against the debt he owed me for the manner of my life. At the finish of it, I felt free of him, and I was able to think calmly once more. Elinor

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

Had laws not been, we never had been blam'd; For not to know we sinn'd is innocence.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

Innocence finds not near so much protection as guilt.

Acquittal of the guilty damns the judge.

The sword of the law should never fall but on those whose guilt is so apparent as to be pronounced by their friends as well as foes.