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Quotes About Guilt

Contrariamente ai riti proposti da un'intera comunità, quelli individuali sono caratterizzati da un senso ci colpa e rimorso.
~ Erich Fromm
Sex no longer frightens people; it can no longer be used to develop a sense of guilt, and thereby to force submission.
~ Erich Fromm
Prometeu nu se supune, dar nici nu se simte vinovat.
~ Erich Fromm
The concept of original sin, which weighs upon all future generations, is characteristic of the authoritarian experience. Moral like any other kind of human failure becomes a fate which man can never escape. Whoever has once sinned is chained eternally to his sin with iron shackles, Man's own doing becomes the power that rules over him and never lets him free. The consequences of guilt can be softened by atonement, but atonement can never do away with the guilt.
~ Erich Fromm
Exploitation was not personal any more, but it had become anonymous, as it were. It was the law of the market that condemned a man to work for starvation wages, rather than the intention or greed of any one individual. Nobody was responsible or guilty, nobody could change conditions either. One was dealing with the iron laws of society, or so it seemed.
~ Erich Fromm
Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the world—things and people—actively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, sepa-rateness is the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt.
~ Erich Froom
Everyone saves someone at least once. Just as he kills someone at least once. Even though he may not know it.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
My rage outweighs my shame, as always happens when one is really ashamed and knows he ought to be.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Sonderbar, dachte Ravic, daß Blutsauger so gern moralisch werden. Dieser alte Gauner mit der Rosette der Ehrenlegion im Knopfloch wirft mir vor, daß ich ihn ausnütze, anstatt sich zu schämen. Und er glaubt es sogar noch.
~ Erich Maria Remarque
Relationship is thus always slavery of a kind, which leaves a residue of guilt.
~ Ernest Becker
Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty, naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power.
~ Ernest Becker
When the average person…cannot hide his failure to be his own hero, then he bogs down in the failure of depression and terrible guilt.
~ Ernest Becker
Psychology narrows the cause for personal unhappiness down to the person himself, and then he is stuck with himself. But we know that the universal and general cause for personal badness, guilt, and inferiority is the natural world and the person's relationship to it as a symbolic animal who must find a secure place in it.
~ Ernest Becker
The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.7
~ Ernest Becker
The science of man has shown us that society will always be composed of passive subjects, powerful leaders, and enemies upon whom we project our guilt and self-hatred.
~ Ernest Becker
So far, about morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.
~ Ernest Hemingway
I obscenity in the milk of my shame.
~ Ernest Hemingway
You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more? 'You think too much, old man' he said aloud.
~ Ernest Hemingway
We used to moralize; today we normalize, and performance anxiety is the secular version of our old religious guilt.
~ Esther Perel
Affairs have their own brand of passion. Secrecy, torment, guilt, transgression, danger, risk, and jealousy are highly combustible, a Molotov cocktail, an erotic explosion far too threatening in a home with children.
~ Esther Perel
Often, when one partner insists that they don't yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused.
~ Esther Perel
This is the challenge of sexual intimacy, of bringing home the erotic. It is the most fearsome of all intimacies because it is all-encompassing. It reaches the deepest places inside us, and involves disclosing aspects of ourselves that are invariably bound up with shame and guilt. It is scary, a whole new kind of nakedness, far more revealing than the sight of our nude bodies.
~ Esther Perel
The shift from shame to guilt is crucial. Shame is a state of self-absorption, while guilt is an empathic, relational response, inspired by the hurt you have caused another. We know from trauma that healing begins when perpetrators acknowledge their wrongdoing.
~ Esther Perel
Often, when one partner insists that they don't yet feel acknowledged, even as the one who hurt them insists they feel terrible, it is because the response is still more shame than guilt, and therefore self-focused. In the aftermath of betrayal, authentic guilt, leading to remorse, is an essential repair tool. A sincere apology signals a care for and commitment to the relationship, a sharing of the burden of suffering
~ Esther Perel