Quotes About Guilt

You can keep dividing and dividing and you'll never entirely get rid of the sourness in your stomach that you taste when you think back to the moment you could have said no

When I kept someone else from getting hurt, did I hurt you?

Suicides, almost by definition, are all ghosts - stuck earthbound because they are desperate to apologize to their loved ones or because they are so ashamed of themselves.

You can't buy a clean conscience.

My sister's in pain, and I'm relieved. What does that say about me?

Kristin nods, marching ahead of Clark, who gazes as the impossible smallness of Kristin's ankles and feet. Years later, while imprisoned for drug charges, he will think of those tiny feet and know he is forever doomed for having lied to her, for having harmed something so delicate, so defenseless, so small, so weak.

Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war.

There is no greater guilt than the unneccessary war.

Sentirse culpable no cambia el pasado, así como preocuparse no cambia el futuro.

Lo único que logramos sintiéndonos culpables por el ayer es arruinar nuestro día de hoy.

Do other people, remembering their parents, feel, as I do, a sense of having inadvertently done a small though significant, irreversible wrong?

a thief's heart is an impetuous organ, and while inwardly he throbs for absolution, at the same time he can't keep from bragging.

Guilt is the only affect I know of that does not diminish with time. Nor does the guilty conscience have any sense of priority or right proportion.

By all appearances, the shooting had been self-defense or, at worst, a spur-of-the-moment crime of passion. Matters like these were traditionally settled quietly, especially when the accused was a highly respected, affluent individual with no criminal record. Savannahians were well aware of past killings in which well-connected suspects were never charged, no matter how obvious their guilt.

Who's the truth good for anyway but the guilty?

Collars, trench coats or jackboots – uniforms allow us to exercise our cruelty without ever feeling guilt.

And they would surely find some way of suggesting that you were as guilty as any of us. No matter how young you were.

If Dr. Allenby thought she had any concept of what guilt was, then she was fooling herself. Guilt was what kept you awake in the middle of the night or, if you managed to sleep, poisoned your dreams. Guilt intruded upon any happy moment, whispering in your ear that you had no right to pleasure. Guilt followed you down streets, interrupting the most mundane moments with remembrances of days and hours when you could have done something to prevent tragedy but chose to do nothing.

With the child already shame-based, the feeling of discouragement takes over the whole personality. As the shame-based child forms her primitive conscience, shame becomes immorality or neurotic guilt. The conforming child believes he can do nothing right

Anger is often blocked from conscious awareness and converted into more tolerable or family-authorized feelings, such as hurt or guilt. The person feeling anger no longer feels it; he feels the acceptable feeling.

To be shame-bound means that whenever you feel any feeling, need or drive, you immediately feel ashamed.

Without any doubt, criminals feel like social outcasts and bear enormous toxic shame.

Such a person does not have his healthy guilt (moral shame) available to him. Healthy guilt would say, "I made a mistake or a blunder, and I can repair that blunder." When a person's guilt has become neurotic, it becomes an "immorality shame.

When Herkamer tells her he hates her, she cries, telling him that maybe someday she won't be home when he wants her. Poor Herkamer is devastated. His abandonment, terror and separation anxiety are triggered. He rushes to his mom, feeling terrible guilt. His awareness of his anger is completely lost. His anger has been converted into guilt.