Quotes About Guilt

Shame, and its offspring, secrecy. The

He's long used to his parents' disapproval—of grades, career choices, girlfriends. What's new is that now they're dealing with his disapproval. He'd always thought them good parents—loving, stable, involved—and still does. It's their anxiety, their defensiveness, their guilt, after all these years, that shakes him. Will that be us? he asks his wife, but they both know the answer already.

The more consciously and freely we choose an evil, the more responsible we are for it and the more guilty we are of it; this is why spiritual sins like pride are greater in guilt than carnal sins.

There is no such thing as an involuntary sin.

murder and adultery are great crimes.

When your friends and lovers start dying, you begin to feel as if you have only narrowly escaped the reaper yourself, and that it's only a matter of time. Which, of course, it is. In the meantime, there's a version of survivor's guilt to deal with.

But if you can take a bit of an advice from an old fool like me, save your best efforts for the living, because one day they'll be dead, too, and you'll end up feeling guilty for neglecting them while they were alive. That's the paradox. Damned if you do and double-damned if you don't.

Guilt—if there was any guilt—spread out and diffused itself over everybody and everything…. Perhaps at some point in time, at some spot in the world, a moment of responsibility existed.

What a job to have to do , Rick thought. I'm a scourge, like famine or plague. Where I go the ancient curse follows. As Mercer said, I am required to do wrong. Everything I've done has been wrong from the start. Anyhow, now it's time to go home. Maybe after I've been there awhile with Iran, I'll forget.

Maybe I shouldn't have told you––about it being electrical." She put her hand out, touched his arm; she felt guilty, seeing the effect it had on him, the change. "No, Rick said. "I'm glad to know. Or rather––" He became silent. "I'd prefer to know.

Nietzche is right about christianity. It's the fucking hair shirt syndrome: always made me feel shame, guilt, always responding to duty and obligations to others --I view myself as weak, at the beck and call of others, obligated to them. Bullshit. I am a man -- as that book on judaism puts it. I need no one's permission anymore. I need not account to anyone. I owe them nothing; they are pushing old buttons, long out of date. I have proved my worth and earned my reward.

In a society of criminals, Shaeffer offered, the innocent man goes to jail.

The guilty, he reflected as he drove amid the heavy late-afternoon traffic as carefully as possible, may flee when no one pursues—he

He has integrated his early fears and guilts into one interwoven grid, the ship said to itself. There is no way I can serve up a pleasant memory to him because he instantly contaminates it.

How can knowing something be sinful?

Was I wrong?" "Yes, of course. But you had no choice." "I must have." "No, you had to do it. If you hadn't done it, you'd have felt feeble." "It shouldn't be about how we feel—guilty, feeble—" "No, and it isn't. It's about wrong and less wrong. Bad and less bad. This is about as good a cover as anyone could find. Leave it at that.

Anyone who doesn't laugh has something on their conscience, you can be sure of that. - from: 'The Twelve Brothers

But he was a human being, or part of one, and he felt just as Lyra did: unhappy, and guilty, and wretchedly lonely.

I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off – the sticky evidence is everywhere!

This is what you know about someone you have to hate: he charges you with his crime and castigates himself in you.

This culture-of-watching's relation to the cycle of indulgence, guilt, and reassurance has important consequences for U.S. art

In all his life he had never known such intensity of passion, such completeness of being. Nothing existed in all the world, save this woman beneath him. He had no sense of place or time, nor even identity. There was no war, no mission, no life beyond. There was no guilt, only a joy he had experienced only once before, in a delirium dream on the point of death.

When your main objective is to be a good kid, Catholicism makes everything extremely complicated

If you give out of fear or guilt, your self-esteem is not enriched; indeed, it is only diminished. You aren't really giving; the other person is taking. You are being taken advantage of, with your consent.