Quotes About Shame

Disappointment, when it involves neither shame nor loss, is as good as success; for it supplies as many images to the mind, and as many topics to the tongue.

Success is about honour, feeling morally calibrated, absence of shame, not what some newspaper defines from an external metric.

I felt ashamed at letting a talent like mine go to waste, and, as I had been given some new pistols, I thought I'd try them out on the Arabs.

Has not, they would say, this Cornelius de Witt been locked up and broken by the rack? Shall we not see him pale, streaming with blood, covered with shame? And was not this a sweet triumph for the burghers of the Hague, whose envy even beat that of the common rabble; a triumph in which every honest citizen and townsman might be expected to share?

Did you not hear what I said, sir? I told you there was fire in my sentence. And though it is only after death that my body is to be burnt, it will always be a terrible disgrace on my memory. I am saved the pain of being burnt alive, and thus, perhaps, saved from a death of despair, but the shamefulness is the same, and it is that I think of.

These diverse effects of slavery and freedom are easily understood: … the men in Kentucky [neither] have zeal nor enlightenment … cross over into Ohio in order to utilize their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame … in Kentucky, masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they receive little fruit from their efforts, while the money that they would give to free workers would be recovered with interest from the value of their labors.

It's your face, poor darling. You're ashamed of your tiger face; but I love it. You burn so brightly for me. You burn through the blindness. Believe me...

It is not only the "beautiful," "good," and pleasant feelings that make us really alive, deepen our existence, and give us crucial insight, but often precisely the unacceptable and unadapted ones from which we would prefer to escape: helplessness, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, rage, and grief. These feelings can be experienced in therapy. When they are understood

To be made of flesh was humiliation.

The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.

she watched others tell their drunken bar stories, prostituting their families and their traumas for popularity and booze.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God reads letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. (Walker 2000: 110)

remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart. I am so lonely, Celie.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was. Well, now I know what you meant. And whether God will read letters or no, I know you will go on writing them; which is guidance enough for me. Anyway, when I don't write to you I feel as bad as I do when I don't pray, locked up in myself and choking on my own heart.

I began to feel humiliated. It felt like I was abusing myself. Hiding something important that was not really at fault.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was.

I remember one time you said your life made you feel so ashamed you couldn't even talk about it to God, you had to write it, bad as you thought your writing was.

You have less honour than a piece of shit.

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one's own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember) which formal conventions, internalized, keep us from discovering in ourselves and others

I had been much more in love with my wife than she with me, that was all. Somehow, you were supposed to be ashamed of this, as though love were a perpetual jostling for the roles of pursuer and pursued. As if it didn't take more courage to admit that someone held your hopes of happiness in their hands. As if it were a choice.

They were all signs and there would be more, surfacing one by one, floating in front of me like flotsam from a shipwreck. Even when I was drowning I dismissed them all, first with foolishness, then with pride, and finally because I had put out my own eyes with hot pokers of shame.

The failure of something great is never a simple matter, but where there is success and glory, there must also be failure and shame.

Huh. Since we've got all the answers, I sometimes wonder why we follow these bastards." "I hear a lot of talk about loyalty." "Since we've a dozen dead masters between us, and both had a hand in more'n one of the downfalls, I feel no shame in saying that loyalty is overrated.

That's what courage is. Taking your disappointments and your failures, your guilt and your shame, all the wounds received and inflicted, and sinking them in the past.