Quotes About Guilt

And then, before he told me, I knew what it was. The old ptitsa who had all the kots and koshkas had passed on to a better world in one of the city hospitals. I'd cracked her a bit too hard, like. Well, well, that was everything. I thought of all those kots and koshkas mewling for moloko and getting none, not any more from their starry forella of a mistress. That was everything. I'd done the lot, now and me still only fifteen.

I was very lighthearted. This often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence or just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has.

When you are guilty, it is not your sins you hate but yourself.

Little bits of things make me do it; — perhaps a word that I said and ought not to have said ten years ago; — the most ordinary little mistakes, even my own past thoughts to myself about the merest trifles. They are always making me shiver.

A man was not necessarily guilty of bribery in the eye of the law because bribery had been committed, even though the bribery so committed had been sufficiently proved to deprive him of the seat which he would otherwise have enjoyed.

Gift bread chokes in a man's throat and poisons his blood, and sits like lead upon the heart.

And in this way the mother and daughter went on discussing the question of the clergyman's guilt in spite of Mrs. Walker's previously expressed desire that nothing more might be said about it. But Mrs. Walker, like many other mothers, was apt to be more free in converse with her daughter than she was with her son.

All too often guilt was a matter of timing. Y. S., who ran away when her village was bombed, was sentenced to six months' labour camp 'for deserting her place of work', while A. S., who refused to leave her home when the Germans were approaching, was condemned in absentia as a 'traitor to the Motherland'. A minimum of ten years in a Gulag labour camp awaited her.

I didn't want her girlfriend to suffer. But I didn't feel particularly guilty, either. They seemed so far from love, I even thought (stupidly) that the girlfriend might be happy to have Lucy taken off her hands. They had become strangers. Maybe they always had been. And we were magic.

men are guilty of the greatest crimes from ambition, and not from necessity

We are survivors. The only survivors. And survivors always feel guilty at being alive.

Many men have been hanged on far slighter evidence," I remarked. "So they have. And many men have been wrongfully hanged.

Fear and guilt are sisters;

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair. Without ever wanting to become reserved and shy, she had spent so long alone, with no one to love, that it was difficult for her to talk, even casually, to another person without self-consciousness and an awkward inability to find words.

The least Charles could have done,' Constance said, considering seriously, 'was shoot himself through the head in the driveway.

Eternal damnation is the lot of mankind; neither tears, nor reparation, can undo Man's heritage of sin.

It's all my fault, anyway." That was her new way of thinking.

She could not remember ever being truly happy in her adult life; her years with her mother had been built up devotedly around small guilts and small reproaches, constant weariness, and unending despair.

On trial... the most important factor is not innocence or guilt, but the impression of innocence or guilt. There's no absolute truth. Just the interpretation of truth.

We have learned, for example, that the more virtuous a man is the more severe is his super-ego, and that he blames himself for misfortunes for which he is clearly not responsible.

In many criminals, especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive. It is as if it was a relief to be able to fasten this unconscious sense of guilt on to something real and immediate.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angsty is the essence of what is called conscience.

It has long been our contention that ' dread of society [soziale Angst] is the essence of what is called conscience.

The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual's dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.