Quotes About Guilt

By remaining silent in the face of criticism, he thought he would seem confident and secure in his integrity—in fact, he seemed guilty and arrogantly evasive.

You're a miracle, Walker. Your fingers are. Your toes are. Your crushing sadness and guilt are.

Of course, who can forget that first love, or first sex, or first drink - especially if they all occur together. I also remember how, after Ligeia had left our lives, I'd worried for months that she might reappear and tell Bill what I'd never confessed to him. But after a while nostalgia supplanted guilt and our summer at Panther Creek became more a tender coming-of-age story, a summer of love complete with bucolic setting.

One of the reasons we come to feel guilty is that we move away from the cross and a desire to please God and live instead for the approval of others. Families have rules, our culture has rules, and the church often has hidden agendas. Our society encourages us to be successful, but if we live by a success/failure model rather than under the authority of Christ, we wound our consciences.

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I'm still going through the motions.

Yet the Leatherstocking's positive twist on genocidal colonialism was based on the reality of invasion, squatting, attacking, and colonizing of the Indigenous nations. Neither Filson nor Cooper created that reality. Rather, they created the narratives that captured the experience and imagination of the Anglo-American settler, stories that were surely instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide and set the pattern of narrative for future US writers, poets, and historians.

Anyone with a lifelong guilty conscience is likely to be a hair-splitting moralist, especially when it comes to other people's behavior.

The Japanese, she argues, are unusually sensitive to the opinion of others. Shame comes from not living up to social obligations. You can feel guilty about a crime that goes unnoticed. Shame depends on the observation of others.

That's the most terrible thing about being a child; you're convinced that it's all your fault. Lulu

a bad conscience is indeed able to make life interesting.

But still he must have recourse to the paradox. For when the individual by his guilt has gone outside the universal he can return to it only by virtue of having come as the individual into an absolute relationship with the absolute.

Raskain rangaistus on nimenomaan muisto.

But repeating the guilt, living in the pain, in the past—it doesn't work. It denies time. It denies life.

Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

I need to tease out how far I was to blame. You'll understand that, Dr Freud. Guilt. Does anyone escape it? Is guilt the reason we make up stories?

No, sir. A sin. A suchmuch thing.

Mr. Eagle, you are not a realized man. That is your weakness and also your power. Before one realizes oneself one has the optimism of ignorance. It can be the saving of one's life. Once realized, one faces the terror of knowing what it is you are and have done...the realized man can have a profound effect on the world about him; he must bear the consequences, and guilt, of that as well...

Montgomery Clift in I Confess?

Guilty secrets make paranoids of us all.

Perhaps it was wrong to lie with her. Another duty, another obligation, another potential source of guilt. Was I lying to her in lying with her?

We often behave in ways that are guaranteed to make us unhappy. Many of us spend our lives marching with open eyes toward remorse, regret, guilt, and disappointment.And nowhere do our injuries seem more casually self-inflicted, or the suffering we create more disproportionate to the needs of the moment, than in the lies we tell to other human beings. Lying is the royal road to chaos.

When we played softball, I'd steal second base, feel guilty and go back.

What a burden it must be to know all the terrible things you've done and support it with arms unfit to carry it all.