Quotes About Shame

People pay an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment

I am ashamed she is ashamed. Because she is my daughter and I am proud of her, and I am her mother but she is not proud of me.

Vergüenza es caerte cuando nadie empuja.

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.

I was always ashamed to take. So I gave. It was not a virtue. It was a disguise.

I am eleven years old, I know, and I am not serious enough. Last night I said to myself: tomorrow I will be good. Good? I wasn't any better than I was the day before. Now here is a new month, and I haven't yet thought out how to be more sensible, how to master my impulses and my temper. I am ashamed to be so undisciplined.

Sunshine is only a restorative—not a stimulus to work. I would write more but I am ashamed to ask for more paper. Love. Henry

I have never described, even in the diary, the act of self-murder which takes place after my being with people. A sense of shame for the most trivial defect, lack, slip, error, for every statement made, or for my silence, for being too gay or too serious, for not being earthy enough, or for being too passionate, for not being free, or being too impulsive, for not being myself or being too much so.

When I awakened at dawn, I had a moment of repulsion, of shame. When my feelings aren't touched, I feel shame, as man does with the whore.

Ne crois pas que ta vérité puisse être trouvé par quelque autre; plus que de tout, aie honte de cela.

La peur du ridicule obtient de nous les pires lâchetés

What I've learned is that women suffer from terrible shame and the shame comes from having been complicit in abuse because one wants to live.

The shame women feel on being fucked and simultaneously feeling pleasure in being possessed, in the shame of having one acknowledged both physically and emotionally the extent to which one has internalized and eroticized their subordination.

Pragmatic Programmers are different. We are driven to find our bugs now, so we don't have to endure the shame of others finding our bugs later.

If conscience is to do its work and the contrite heart is to feel its proper remorse, it is necessary for each individual to confess his sin by name. The confession must be intensely personal. In a meeting of ministers, probably no single sin should be acknowledged with deeper shame than the sin of prayerlessness. Each one of us needs to confess that we are guilty of this.

His brain sits before its cash register again, charging him for old shames as if he has not paid before.

There is nothing like that for the boys who did not go to war; they were not soldiers, and did not die. They are burned out of history, for nothing blazes quite as hot as shame. There are no bills in circulation. But I have signed their names to this story. I have signed all of our names. How else will we be remembered?

The damage in many cases was lifelong. These women had not just surrendered a child. They had surrendered control over the most important decision they might ever make to people who they felt did not necessarily have their best interest at heart. The shame was no longer about being single and pregnant. The shame was that they had given away, or not fought hard enough to keep, their child.

Shame is a very effective way to silence individuals, and those who are less socially or economically powerful are rarely in a position to influence the decisions that affect them.

Integrity consists of many things, but it generally requires us to avoid behavior that readily leads to shame or remorse. The ethical terrain here extends well beyond the question of honesty—but to truly have integrity, we must not feel the need to lie about our personal lives. To lie is to erect a boundary between the truth we are living and the perception others have of us.

Luckily, this shame is not indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood.

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.

Many a man has been ashamed of his wicked attempts, when he has been repulsed, that would never have been ashamed of them, had he succeeded.

He had entered her body as one walks into a church, a little ashamed for what he was, apologetic because he wasn't worthy, a supplicant for mercy, contrite that such a temple was defiled by his presence.