Quotes About Guilt And Shame

#1. Responsibilites and expectations are the basis of guilt and shame and judgement, and they provide the essential framework that promotes performance as the basis for identity and value.

Wm. Paul Young

#2. Anger, depression, guilt, and shame are the product of the thinking that is at the base of violence on our planet.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#3. I would rather have these things weigh on my mind. At the end of this tunnel of guilt and shame, there must be a light of some kind.

Ani DiFranco

#4. Every major life decision I made came from my pain, guilt and shame...even down to the man I chose for a husband.

Elona Washington

#5. Comfort came in and stood with an appearance of guilt and shame.
Her head bent, her eyes soaked with tears, her hands and legs, vibrating like a guiter string as perspiration covered her entire body, she felt like disappearing into the thin air, maybe to another mind creating world.

Michael Bassey Johnson

#6. Living was living. The price was guilt and shame.

Markus Zusak

#7. How vast the benefits divine which we in Christ possess! We are redeemed from guilt and shame and called to holiness. But not for works which we have done, or shall hereafter do, hath God decreed on sinful men salvation to bestow.

Augustus Toplady

#8. There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.

George Carlin

#9. All this guilt and shame and remorse you carry, Kestrel. Don't you see? That is what they burned you with. And you have added to it, all these years. The wall is of your own making. Take it down. Forgive yourself. Come out.

Robin Hobb

#10. People, especially women, are judged on their bodies. And food, far from being a source of energy and enjoyment, becomes a battleground of guilt and shame and excess and deprivation. Everywhere we look, success and sexiness and happiness seem to belong to the thin.

Emma Woolf

#11. The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#12. I had a lot of guilt and shame when I was running from God, but nothing like when I was running for God. I was always looking for God's approval, and that's where the guilt and shame came out in a big way.

Jud Wilhite

#13. I am not racked with self-loathing. Some issues of guilt and shame, but I'm a pretty good guy.

Marcus Brigstocke

#14. Are we bereft of citizenship because we are mothers, wives and daughters of a mighty people? Have women no country
no interests staked in public weal
no liabilities in common peril
no partnership in a nation's guilt and shame?

Angelina Grimke

#15. What I do know now, and didn't know then is that, in the long run, motive matters more with good deeds than it does with bad. When all the guilt and shame for the bad we've done have run their course, it's the good we did that can save us.

Gregory David Roberts

#16. Hell existed in the imagination of those who feared it, because of the guilt and shame they carried with them after death.

Andrea Barbosa

#17. Guilt and shame have, until now, kept me silent on this issue. I am old enough, even if just twenty, to know that I have no logical reason to feel either guilt or shame, that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Yet I've been so long marinated in both emotions that they will forever flavor me.

Dean Koontz

#18. Only the Lord Jesus can redeem the soul that is steeped in guilt and shame. This baggage weighs us down until we accept Jesus' gift - the gift that liberates souls from sin's power.

Billy Graham

#19. Child abuse is one of those issues that's very difficult to talk about because it's surrounded by guilt and shame and so on, but us avoiding that issue doesn't help those kids in need out there who need support.

Chris Hemsworth

#20. Words like guilt and shame and nightmares - the kind of nightmares that drag you from sleep, and leave you reaching for something no longer there.

Nathan Filer

#21. When you hear the haunting melody of guilt and shame, drown it out with God's song of forgiveness and love.

Katy Kauffman

#22. The more guilt and shame that we have buried within ourselves, the more compelled we feel to seek relief through sin.

Brennan Manning

#23. If you are filled with guilt and shame, it's because your heart remembers God but your head seems to have forgotten Him.

Kate McGahan

#24. I walked, floated, lighter - forty miles, my biggest day yet. I'd lifted the burden of guilt and shame off my body. I held my new hard-won wisdom, the gift three months of walking in the wilderness had carried me to: compassion for my younger self - forgiveness for my innocence.

Aspen Matis

#25. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness?

Bernhard Schlink

#26. When I think about all the time I wasted feeling guilty and ashamed about things I should have embraced long ago, it fills me with guilt and shame.

Nathan Rabin

#27. In the end, it was the secrets that held me hostage and fuelled my depression, but, once released, emancipation - from fear, shame, guilt and judgement - was finally possible.

B.G. Bowers

#28. Guilt is one side of a nasty triangle; the other two are shame and stigma. This grim coalition combines to inculpate women themselves of the crimes committed against them.

Germaine Greer

#29. Guilt is just as powerful, but its influence is positive, while shame's is destructive. Shame erodes our courage and fuels disengagement.

Brene Brown

#30. Don't underestimate the power of a guilty mind. Never underestimate self-shame and self-destruction.

Tim Hawken

#31. Help your children to see and notice poverty and differences in privilege that seem inhumane and unfair. Do this in a way that does not increase guilt or shame for what you have as a family, but rather helps them see their responsibility for sharing with others and keeping others in mind.

Polly Young-Eisendrath

#32. Where guilty is, rage and courage doth abound.

Ben Jonson

#33. Last time I'd made a trek to Zane's hotel room, we'd been at NerdCon, and I'd been fueled by pride and anger and desire. Now, all I felt was shame and guilt. And love. In

Megan Erickson

#34. Your mistakes are to help you develop your purpose, not shame and guilt.

Sue Fitzmaurice

#35. My entire demeanor is displaying confusion, guilt, shame, pain, pleasure, and a yearning need for him. Lying beneath this huge man, I feel so very helpless and pinned like a butterfly on a plaque. Lucas's

Erotic Storm

#36. I've got the Jewish guilt and the Irish shame and it's a hell of a job distinguishing which is which.

Kevin Kline

#37. Nobody disappears completely anymore. The only thing that's disappeared is privacy, which is never coming back. And which is probably a good thing. Why should anything be private? No hiding, no guilt, no shame. Just a completely transparent world.

Paul Russell

#38. Every word I put down, I put down with tears, with bitter blood, with sour gall, well mixed and blended with shame and guilt.

V.C. Andrews

#39. When we wallow in guilt, remorse, and shame over real or imagined sins of the past, we are disdaining God's gift of grace.

Brennan Manning

#40. With no guilt and no shame, no sorrow or blame. Whatever it is, we are all the same.

Peter Gabriel

#41. Every morning I look in the mirror and remind myself: "No one owes you sh*t!" In this way, I am never disappointed. Never placing blame.

Brandi L. Bates

#42. Secondly, if we continue to view ourselves as moral lepers and spiritual failures, if our lives are shadowed by low self-esteem, shame, remorse, unhealthy guilt, and self-hatred, we reject the teaching of Jesus and cling to our negative self-image. In

Brennan Manning

#43. Men the most infamous are fond of fame, And those who fear not guilt yet start at shame.

Charles Churchill

#44. I place us where we are a happy couple who are madly in love, and we are kissing the way people kiss on their wedding day. With joy and relief and love. Without guilt. Without Shame.

A.S. King

#45. From the perspective of the one committing suicide, his or her act can be one of the most perverse forms of moral manipulation, as it abandons those left behind to their shame, guilt, and grief. Suicide is something like a metaphysical "I gotcha!" It is often an attempt to kill or wound others.

Stanley Hauerwas

#46. Ricky just listens. He isn't shocked. He isn't surprised. He listens to me because he knows. He knows the shame and the guilt and the sorrow and the rage. And he does not judge me. He just listens.

Emily Andrews

#47. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

Michael Eric Dyson

#48. Balance is of the essence,' she said. 'That appies to all good, harmonious relationships. Balance in guilt, balance in shame and pangs of conscience.

Jo Nesbo

#49. In Adam we became identified with guilt, fear, and shame. In Christ we are now identified with forgiveness, confidence, and honor.

Timothy C. Tennent

#50. The wicked fear the good, because the good are a constant reproach to their consciences. The ungodly like religion in the same way that they like lions, either dead or behind bars; they fear religion when it breaks loose and begins to challenge their consciences.

Fulton J. Sheen

#51. Children who use more shame self-talk (I am bad) versus guilt self-talk (I did something bad) struggle mightily with issues of self-worth and self-loathing. Using shame to parent teaches children that they are not inherently worthy of love.

Brene Brown

#52. I was just lying there, swimming in my own shame and guilt, when this still small voice whispered into the depths of my soul: I love you. I desire you. I delight in you. I saw you were going to that before I went to the cross, and I still went.

Jefferson Bethke

#53. You can't look outside of yourself. You must look within yourself, and address all of the things that are going on within you, and clear out the things that are not useful. Whether it's fear or anger or shame or guilt or whatever it is - clean that stuff up.

Iyanla Vanzant

#54. The conflict between church teachings and natural desires results in guilt, shame and anger.

Darrel Ray

#55. A tranquil conscience invites freedom from anguish, sorrow, guilt, shame, and self-condemnation. It provides a foundation for happiness. It is a condition of immense worth.

Richard G. Scott

#56. The distinction between shame and guilt is very important, since these two emotions may tear a person in opposite directions. The wish to relieve guilt may motivate a confession, but the wish to avoid the humiliation of shame may prevent it.

Paul Ekman

#57. God didn't send His only Son to die on the cross so that we can hide behind our guilt, shame, and pride.

Heather Bixler

#58. An exciting and inspiring future awaits you beyond the noise in your mind, beyond the guilt, doubt, fear, shame, insecurity and heaviness of the past you carry around.

Debbie Ford

#59. I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.

Sylvia Plath

#60. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are. We don't share thoughts, we share carefully sanitized, watered-down versions of them.

Jonathan Tropper

#61. With death, all suffering would end. Doubt would end. Shame and guilt would end. All her questions would end. Memory - most mercifully of all - would end. She could quietly excuse herself from life.

Elizabeth Gilbert

#62. I had to sever my emotional cord to escape the anger and shame that silently slithered through my head, disconnecting myself from the stares and whispers that followed me down the hall.

Rebecca Donovan

#63. While guilt over sinfulness can often lead to repentance, shame leads to indifference, intolerance, lack of vulnerability, and lack of intimacy with others as it burros its way further into our minds.

Tyler Braun

#64. Watch out for each other. Love everyone and forgive everyone, including yourself. Forgive your anger. Forgive your guilt. Your shame. Your sadness. Embrace and open up your love, your joy, your truth, and most especially your heart.

Jim Henson

#65. The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all.

John Howard Griffin

#66. Murderers with severe personality disorders, police had learned, sometimes could fool a lie detector because they lacked shame and guilt, and didn't feel the normal stress when lying.

Michael Benson

#67. He gave himself to them completely, with no guilt, no shame, no reservation, and in that surrender he found a quiet, shining pearl he had never known existed - himself. He was Sam. He was Sunshine. He was Peaches.

Heidi Cullinan

#68. If you don't enjoy your life, sorrow, sadness, suffering, fear, shame and guilt will.

Iyanla Vanzant

#69. It's an absurd request. Our minds, unedited by guilt or shame, are selfish and unkind, and the majority of our thoughts, at any given time, are not for public consumption, because they would either be hurtful or else just make us look like the selfish and unkind bastards we are.

Jonathan Tropper

#70. Rather than being able to have a healthy relationship with our own sexual imagination, we're driven into some dark corners by shame and embarrassment and guilt, and those dark corners breed all sorts of monsters.

Alan Moore

#71. Shame and guilt are noble emotions essential in the maintenance of civilized society, and vital for the development of some of the most refined and elegant qualities of human potential.

Willard Gaylin

#72. The Mommy Wars, as they stand today, serve as an effective check on the ambitions of the American mother. The phenomenon keeps women in a perpetual state of guilt, shame and inadequacy, and does so without involving anyone but wealthy white women.

Shannon Drury

#73. His eyes were likewise greeted by White Fang, but about the latter there were no signs of shame nor guilt. He carried himself with pride, as though, forsooth, he had achieved a deed praiseworthy and meritorious. There was about him no consciousness of sin.

Jack London

#74. Work on psychological blocks like shame and guilt - they falsely color your reality.

Deepak Chopra

#75. Shame is difficult. It's a weapon and a signal. It can paralyze or motivate. My friend Louis CK likes to say that "guilt is an intersection" Getting out of it means making a choice and moving forward.

Amy Poehler

#76. Life ... as God intended it enables us to live above the drag of fear, superstition, shame, pessimism, guilt, anxiety, worry, and all the negativity that keeps people from seizing each day as a gift from Him.

Charles R. Swindoll

#77. Power-Over leads to punishment and violence. Power-With leads to compassion and understanding, and to learning motivated by reverence for life rather than fear, guilt, shame, or anger.

Marshall B. Rosenberg

#78. There is so much shame and guilt in our society, and I think it has deprived a lot of people from living fully. We are all facing battles ... We've all had someone who has hurt us. So let's talk about it.

Mary Lambert

#79. Grace gives us the power to live, and mercy keeps us free from guilt, condemnation, and shame.

John Bevere

#80. Inside Laila too a battle was being waged : guilt on one side, partnered with shame, and, on the other, the conviction that what she and Tariq had done was not sinful; that it had been natural, good, beautiful, even inevitable, spurred by the knowledge that they might never see each other again.

Khaled Hosseini

#81. Nothing more unqualified the man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

Jonathan Swift

#82. When someone reacts violently and aggressively, it only goes to demonstrate the lack of truth, trust and confidence in oneself and issue that we are defending. It rather portrays the guilt, shame and self anger for defending the indefensible.

Vishwas Chavan

#83. His desire was as deep and boundless as the sea, but when the tide receded, the rocks of shame and guilt thrust up as sharp as ever. Sometimes the waves would cover them, but they remained beneath the waters, hard and black and slimy.

George R R Martin

#84. genuinely righteous people invariably become more aware of their personal guilt and need for forgiveness than those who have become so foul and hard they cannot detect their own shame.

D. A. Carson

#85. If all of our sins, bad habits, and poor choices were permanently inked into our skin like tattoos, we would all dress quite modestly.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#86. All lies fall somewhere into these five categories. These are to: avoid hurting someone; avoid feeling guilt or shame; avoid conflict and stress (minor to major); gain a social advantage; avoid a significant loss.

Caesar Lincoln

#87. Shannon: Only the living suffered. Only they were riddled with guilt and regret and unanswered questions.

Nora Roberts

#88. Guilt is not of God. We receive only a divine conviction with our shame swallowed up in Christ. Walk in truth and find freedom in His Grace!

Alisa Hope Wagner

#89. We feel guilty for what we do. We feel shame for what we are.

Lewis B. Smedes

#90. My son John was just under a year old when I collapsed with a life-threatening kidney disease. The shame and guilt resulting from my unplanned pregnancy had continued to fester to the point that my toxic feelings literally poisoned my body.

Mary Manin Morrissey

#91. I'm not sure if the shame/guilt distinction resonates for me. I just know that shame is a debilitating emotion that is perpetuated by Church and State.

Marilyn Dumont

#92. No one tape her deepest gifts through shame, guilt or anger. In fact, if you come from obligation, others smell the sadness in your blood and they will run the other way,

Tama Kieves

#93. There are so many more productive things to do than sit around feeling shame and guilt. Beyond touching on shame and guilt in a perfunctory manner, I wouldn't bother with that at all.

Antony Hegarty

#94. It's ugly in there, decayed by lies and shame, endlessly bleeding for all the lives I've ruined. You're the eighth reason I don't deserve affection." Eight slaves worth of guilt.

Pepper Winters

#95. There's the unusual stuff that psychopaths do - impulsive antisocial behavior, beginning in childhood - and there are the moral emotions that psychopaths lack. They feel no compassion, guilt, shame, or even embarrassment, which makes it easy for them to lie, and to hurt family, friends, and animals.

Jonathan Haidt

#96. Glory, built on selfish principles, is shame and guilt.

William Cowper

#97. The agreement is so strong that even if we understand the concept of it not being true, we feel the blame, the guilt, and the shame that occur if we go against these rules.

Miguel Ruiz

#98. Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on!

Charles Dickens

#99. When guilt is in its blush of infancy, it trembles in a tenderness of shame; and the first eye that pierces through the veil that hides the secret brings it to the face

Thomas Southerne

#100. Let me show you what life is like lived in the moment. No past, no future, just the one perfect moment you're standing in and there's no guilt and there's no shame and there's absolutely nothing to be afraid of ...

Tiffany Reisz