Quotes About Shame

You can't be ashamed of the work you've done. You make a decision, and then you have to live with the consequences.

They're the last human beings susceptible to human shame. Politicians are the only people left for whom, occasionally, shame hurts them. Everyone else, we've sort of done away with it as a concept, and we're hurtling through space like animals, basically.

Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet. The shame doesn't even belong to us, but we still experience it because we're a part of the African race. If it happened to one, it happened to all. We carry that burden.

I had always known that I was Jewish - we celebrated the holidays, we went to a synagogue - but I had never known that I was supposed to feel ashamed about it.

The morality of the church is anachronistic. Will it ever develop a moral insight and courage sufficient to cope with the real problems of modern society? If it does it will require generations of effort and not a few martyrdoms. We ministers maintain our pride and self-respect and our sense of importance only through a vast and inclusive ignorance. If we knew the world in which we live a little better we would perish in shame or be overcome by a sense of futility.

Shame was a peculiar beast, Naomi knew. She suspected everyone had it: the dragon they wanted to slay. But for her it was different. Naomi wanted to bathe in it, to stand under its waterfall and come out blessed.

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not.

During sexual abuse, children feel and incorporate the rage, pain, shame, and sense of perversion that the perpetrator is projecting. They take these feelings into the very core of themselves, and they are badly traumatized by the emotions surrounding the assault, as well as by the assault itself.

Memory repression thrives in shame, secrecy, and shock. The shame and degradation experienced during sexual assault is profound, especially for children who have no concept of what is happening to them or why. Sexual abuse is so bizarre and horrible that the frightened child feels compelled to bury the event deep inside his or her mind.

Allow yourself to envision us together," he'd told her just last week. Stella shook her head. No, there was no future with someone she was ashamed to be seen with in public.

He's disgusted and suspicious. They had Gebert down there, slapping him around and squealing and yelling at him. If you're so sure violence is inferior technique, you should have seen that exhibition; it was wonderful. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you had done it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it. But

If you're so sure violence is inferior technique, you should have seen that exhibition; it was wonderful. They say it works sometimes, but even if it does, how could you depend on anything you got that way? Not to mention that after you had done it a few times any decent garbage can would be ashamed to have you found in it.

She saw a roach pass by her foot, and she instantly lifted it up and brought it down on the roach. She didn't want anyone to see her shame. Not even roaches.

Some spit fire out of their mouths and others juggled balls or pins, their faces painted to look like clowns. Juana wondered if they did that to hide their real faces and not feel ashamed.

Nay, in my opinion, you ought to be ashamed to open your mouths ever hereafter against the present government of the Church, and for the new platform, until you can be contented to be so far from coveting the goods of the Church, as that you are both willing and ready to deliver out of your hand such spoils and preys thereof as you have already.

When I compare my slow and unprofitable life with the frequent and wonderful mercies received, it shames me, it silences me, and leaves me inexcusable.

Sirs, so much as your hearts as is empty of Christ and heaven, let it be filled with shame and sorrow, and not with ease (483).

Scheff called shame the social emotion because pride and shame provide the social evaluative feedback as we experience ourselves as if through others' eyes.

For inspiration, he read Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and listened to the Drive-By Truckers singing about the duality of pride and shame they felt as white Southerners.

He wrote to his mother that even though the prize had gone in the past to writers he despised, it pleased him: 'I suppose at the bottom of every human mind is the rather degraded love of success – any kind of success. One feels ashamed of one's own pleasure.'39

I have never understood why an intoxicated man feels the climax of insult is to hurl at you your name. Perhaps because he knows it is the one charge you cannot deny. But invariably before you escape, as though assured the words will cover your retreat with shame, he throws at you your full title.

God has chosen to save the world through the cross, through the shameful and powerless death of the crucified Messiah. If that shocking event is the revelation of the deepest truth about the character of God, then our whole way of seeing the world is turned upside down… all values are transformed… God refuses to play games of power and prestige on human terms.

And under my breath I was telling it to hisht and for shame, and if I had known any swearing I would have had that in, too.

After tens of thousands of pages, they've circled back to Tolstoy and are now a good inch and a half into Anna Karenina. Dot resumes the story with no trace of self-consciousness or shame, no hint that art and life have enrolled in the same drawing class. And that, for Ray, is the greatest mercy fiction gives: proof that the worst the two of them have done to each other is just another tale worth reading together, at the end of the day.