Quotes About Guilt

I will tell you a terrible secret: language is punishment. Language must encompass all things and in it all things must again transpire according to guilt and the degree of guilt.

Wasn't there something inherently selfish about confessions, anyway? The guilty party's chance to purge their guilt. Never mind that another person got flattened in the process. Ignorance was bliss. No pain in not knowing.

Like she's realized, really realized, she's failed as a mother. I instantly regret being the one to bring the realization to the surface again.

This thing of Beauty is a Guilt forever.

All sins cast long shadows.

But most- and worst- of all, as we and all the world slowly learned about the full extent of Hitler's Final Solution, we realized that all Germans, no matter what they had suffered or whether they had participated in any way in the atrocities, would bear guilt, shame and dishonor, probably forever.

Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.

Children don't read to find their identity. They don't read to free themselves of guilt, to quench the thirst for rebellion, or to get rid of alienation. They have no use for psychology. They detest sociology…. They still believe in good, the family, angels, devils, witches, goblins, logic, clarity, punctuation and other such obsolete stuff.

When you kill, you always kill the wrong man.

Adesso che son qui, ad analizzarmi, sono colto da un dubbio: che io forse abbia amato tanto la sigaretta per poter riversare su di essa la colpa della mia incapacità?

Yet our common moral knowledge is as real as arithmetic, and probably just as plain. Paradoxically, maddeningly, we appeal to it even to justify wrongdoing; rationalization is the homage paid by sin to guilty knowledge.

dark side took over, and things got…out of hand. He always felt bad afterward. But while Martin

According to Christian belief, Jesus is our Saviour, not by virtue of what He said, not even by virtue of what He was, but by what He did. He is our Saviour, not because He has inspired us to live the same kind of life that He lived, but because He took upon Himself the dreadful guilt of our sins and bore it instead of us on the cross. Such is the Christian conception of the Cross of Christ.

Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.

They feel guilty for having survived so they pretend the bad things never happened Exodus (1960) screenplay

What are you going to teach me about right and wrong? I know what is wrong. I have done wrong. I am told every day, by every face I see, every wall I face, that I am wrong.

The hangovers are the price I pay. Each skull-splitting excursion down my personal rabbit hole to hell is a guilt tinged reminder of every little fuckin' thing I've ever done wrong and never made amends for.

A Prayer for Joy" Help me, O God, To listen to what it is that makes my heart glad And to follow where it leads. May joy, not guilt, Your voice, not the voices of others, Your will, not my willfulness, Be the guides that lead me to my vocation. Help me to unearth the passions of my heart That lay buried in my youth. And help me to go over that ground again and again Until I can hold in my hands, Hold and treasure, Your calling on my life. —Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul

Three great obstacles to progress: guilt, envy, and resentment.

Guilt was a living, breathing thing. Guilt could tie you tighter than ropes, and he should know. He had extensive experience with both. He'd been the captive of a madman, along with Jess, for three days that had felt like an eternity. Then, this past year, he'd been a POW in Afghanistan, the prisoner of insurgents, for six torturous months. Yet it had been the three days with Jess that had broken him in ways the insurgents could never accomplish.

The walls were coming down around me, but still, I couldn't imagine telling the truth. Not now. It was too late. How can I tell Mom and Dad what we'd done? It would ruin everything. It would ruin their image of me; it would ruin every thought they'd ever had about who I was. It would be another death.Another loss. Another miscarriage.

Damn you Gray for getting him so bloody soused he can't even think straight!

Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and all my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. [p. 128]

Mr. Tibble bowed his head, and Amanda was immediately sorry she'd spoken with such cool disdain. She did not like to see timid Mr. Tibble quake, but she was having a hard time controlling her displeasure. The envelope she'd let fall to her lap, standing out so glaringly white against the skirt of her black bombazine gown, might contain a letter from her deceased parents using just the sort of tender words she'd longed to hear from them