Quotes About Shame

The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.

When you feel spontaneously excited by something—a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want—shame is the voice that brings you "back down to earth.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It's not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.

The only guilt of the victims, he thought, had been that they accepted it as guilt.

I wish I had the power to tell them that the despair of their hearts was not to be final, and their night was not without hope. For the battle they lost can never be lost. For that which they died to save can never perish. Through all the darkness, through all the shame of which men are capable, the spirit of man will remain alive on this earth. It may sleep, but it will awaken. It may wear chains, but it will break through. And man will go on.

What brought it to pass? What disaster took their reason away from men? What whip lashed them to their knees in shame and submission? The worship of the word We.

He felt something dark and leering in the manner with which people spoke of Prescott's genius; as if they were not doing homage to Prescott, but spitting upon genius. For once, Keating could not follow people; it was too clear, even to him, that public favor had ceased being a recognition of merit, that it had become almost a brand of shame.

It turns out to be eminently useful to have a disgrace in your past; Salem endures not only as a metaphor but as a vaccine and a taunt. It glares at us when fear paralyzes reason, when we overreact or overcorrect, when we hunt down or deliver up the alien or seditious.

It's what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!

The shame of a genius may be his intellectual futility, the knowledge of how uncertain is all that he has accomplished. And genius is, above all, constant doubting.

In terms of their power over other adults, the sheer force of their monomaniacal self-interest and their utter lack of shame, they may be compared to only one other group of humans on the planet: babies.

There is no shame here. The places where we still fear are simply the places we have yet to fully receive God's love. Only by his grace and in his love can we let our fear go. Let go and receive. Receive his dreams. Receive his love. It is an exchange of fear for desire. It is an exchange of death for life. There is no fear in love. And I can tell you this with certainty: God does not want you to live in fear. And he does want you to live. Don't be afraid. Just believe.

The voice of Shame says, I basically hate me; I need to get rid of me. The voice of Discipline says, I've got to fix me, because me is not good. God says, I love you; let me restore you. I like that one best. 

The voice of Shame says, I basically hate me; I need to get rid of me. The voice of Discipline says, I've got to fix me, because me is not good. God says, I love you; let me restore you.

Self-hatred, shame, and fear—though rampant in so many of our hidden worlds—are simply never going to be capable of creating or sustaining the growth we long for. Yet most women try to use shame as their inner motivator.

Adults are bad at remembering how powerful they can be because somewhere along the line, they were shamed for their imagination.

And I never felt that good in my life. But I also felt bad because I saw her naked without her permission.

Part of life is learning what to be ashamed of and what to be proud of.

It's not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame, and self-loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter, and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.

It is a little theory of mine that has much exercised my mind lately, that most of the problems of this silly and delightful world derive from our apologising for those things which we ought not to apologise for, and failing to apologise for those things for which apology is necessary.

Just as it is the love of money that is the root of all evil, it is the belief in shamefulness that is the root of all misery.

Don't go looking for something psychological that isn't there. I have a bath after any kind of strenuous exercise. It doesn't mean I feel dirty," though he did, "it doesn't mean I'm trying to wash you out of my life," though he was, "it doesn't mean guilt, shame, repentance or anything like that," though it did. "It just means I want a bath.

Since my earliest years I felt nothing but shame for the useless casing of flesh I inhabit.