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Quotes About Guilt

Maybe he also felt angry or insulted, if it occurred to him then or later that maybe he hadn't made a mistake but that I had deliberately stood him up, and not the way I did it — alone up there in the apartment, uncomfortable and embarrassed, chickening out, hiding out — but, he would imagine, in collusion with someone else, a girlfriend or boyfriend, confiding in them, snickering over him.
~ Lydia Davis
Many deeply hidden memories have come flooding back. The important message here though is that it is possible to heal and survive. Everyone has survived their own kind of emotional or mental trauma. We all have our inner fears and misreplaced feelings of guilt.
~ Unknown
He had lived to please himself instead of God all those years, giving little more than lip service to His holy laws. And now when Zechariah cried out to God, his numberless sins swallowed up his prayers before they reached heaven. His guilt filled the yawning gulf between him and God.
~ Lynn Austin
No, Engelena. Don't blame yourself. Adam and Eve had a perfect parent, yet they rebelled.
~ Lynn Austin
Until Gettysburg," she continued, "I was working for the wrong reasons. At first it was to prove myself worthy in someone's eyes. Later it was out of guilt, trying to find atonement in God's eyes. But atonement is free, never earned. And I've learned that the only person I need to please with my life is God.
~ Lynn Austin
He couldn't imagine what had made his father so angry or the townspeople so mean, but he knew with a child's sudden, clear conviction that it was his fault.
~ Lynn Flewelling
Yet here the pilots were in England, fêted and pampered by the upper echelons of society, glamorized in movies and the press, enjoying themselves in spite of any guilt they may have felt. And here were their hosts and hostesses, with their very British insouciance, acting as if there would always be an England. In one context, this attitude was infuriating; in another, it was one of Britain's greatest strengths.
~ Unknown
We scramble or race to "get what's ours." We often grow selfish, greedy, petty, fearful, or controlling, or sometimes confused, conflicted, or guilty. We see ourselves as winners or losers, powerful or helpless, and we let those labels deeply define us in ways that are inaccurate, as if financial wealth and control indicate innate superiority, and lack of them suggests a lack of worth or basic human potential.
~ Unknown
A whole lifetime could be spent making excuses, giving in, feeling guilty, resolving to do better, mentally beating myself up for not sticking to my resolve, feeling like a failure, and then resigning myself to the fact that things can't change.
~ Lysa TerKeurst
My soul felt free. I was amazed that I ever desired to satisfy my taste buds over satisfying my desire to break free from all the guilt, all the destruction, all the defeat.
~ Lysa TerKeurst
You made her apologize for sickness. For her courage. You made her feel sorry for dying.
~ Unknown
During the Bosnian conflict, an international tribunal was established to prosecute the perpetrators of crimes against humanity. I was a firm advocate of the tribunal because only through a judicial process is it possible to establish individual culpability for crimes that might otherwise be attributed to an entire group—and nothing does more to trigger additional cycles of violence than perceptions of collective guilt.
~ Madeleine K. Albright
through a judicial process is it possible to establish individual culpability for crimes that might otherwise be attributed to an entire group—and nothing does more to trigger additional cycles of violence than perceptions of collective guilt.
~ Madeleine K. Albright
Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.
~ Madeline Miller
But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone.
~ Madeline Miller
I could have stopped them," he said. The skin of his face was very pale; his voice was hoarse. "I was close enough. I could have saved her." I shook my head. "You could not have known." He buried his face in his hands and did not speak. I held him and whispered all the bits of broken comfort I could find.
~ Madeline Miller
I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.
~ Madeline Miller
Guilt is the most merciless disease of man. It stains all the other areas of living. It darkens all skies.
~ John D. MacDonald
The real guilt is in being a human being. That is the horrible reality which bugs us all. Wolves, as a class, are cleaner, more industrious, far less savage, and kinder to each other and their young.
~ John D. MacDonald
Tutti colpevoli, nessuno colpevole,' as the Italian saying has it: 'If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.
~ Unknown
Then love is sin, and let me sinful be.
~ John Donne
So easie still it proves in Factious Times, With publick Zeal to cancel private Crimes: How safe is Treason, and how sacred ill, Where none can sin against the Peoples Will: Where Crouds can wink; and no offence be known, Since in anothers guilt they find their own.
~ John Dryden
Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone. I did not pray for her, because prayer has no efficacy; I did not cry for her, because only extroverts cry twice; I sat in the silence of that night, that infinite hostility to man, to permanence, to love, remembering her, remembering her.
~ John Fowles
Ogni epoca, ogni epoca colpevole, erige alte mura intorno alle sue Versailles; e io personalmente le odio ancora di più quando vengono costruite dalla letteratura e dall'arte.
~ John Fowles